10 Movie Casting Choices That Were Total Misdirection

3. Sean Bean - Flightplan

What Everyone Expected

While it wouldn't be fair to call Sean Bean typecast, he is best known for two things in his movie roles - playing bad guys and dying. Dying a lot.

And so, when he was cast as the airplane pilot in 2005's Hitchcockian thriller Flightplan - where Jodie Foster's daughter goes missing mid-flight - most audiences believed they were being set up for yet another villainous Sean Bean reveal.

With the trailers implying that Bean's character was trying to gaslight Foster's hero into believing she'd lost her mind, what other conclusion could viewers possibly arrive at?

What We Got

Though the film isn't particularly good, it does smartly toy with the audience's perception of Sean Bean, because as it turns out, his character is just a totally normal, regular guy with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

He only doubts Foster's protagonist because, you know, her story does actually sound pretty far-fetched out of context and there's no proof supporting it.

Once she's proven to be telling the truth at the end of the film, he even soundly apologises for not believing her, and better still, actually survives the movie!

The real villain, in case you're curious, is revealed to be air marshal Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard).