10 Movie Characters More Important Than You Think
3. Cpl. Fife - The Thin Red Line
If you watch Terrence Malick's war epic The Thin Red Line without any knowledge of its production, you'd probably assume Cpl. Geoffrey Fife (Adrien Brody) to be just another character in the film's colossal ensemble.
Fife only has a few minutes of substantial screen time throughout the near-three-hour movie and speaks just two lines of dialogue, no matter that this was basically the polar opposite of his original conception.
According to Brody himself, Fife was originally supposed to be the lead character of the story - as he is in James Jones' original novel - but during post-production Malick decided to minimise his role instead, as proved quite the shock to the actor when he turned up to watch the movie for the first time.
And so, while Malick may have ultimately found Fife less interesting than he initially thought during shooting, for any audience members who pawn him off as just another soldier, he actually had a far more in-depth story and character arc that's just rotting away in a studio vault somewhere.