10 Movie Endings Actors Didn't Know Were Going To Happen

Production on Ridley Scott's Gladiator was thrown for a loop with the death of actor Oliver Reed, who played Maximus' (Russell Crowe) mentor Proximo.

This resulted in Scott using digital doubles to keep Proximo in the film as much as possible, but according to cast member Djimon Hounsou - who portrayed warrior slave Juba - Reed's death also had a profound effect on Gladiator's ending.

While Hounsou doesn't go into specifics about Reed's role, it's clear that he was originally intended to be part of the final scene.

So instead, Scott came up with a new ending on-the-fly, which saw Juba burying figurines of Maximus' family at the Colosseum. It's an ending which Hounsou himself remained unaware of until time came to shoot it with a skeleton crew. He said in an interview with GQ:

"That scene was not written. We didn't know how we were going to finish the film because, towards the end of filming, we had lost one important character in the making of Gladiator, and that was Oliver Reed. That shifted everything and that changed everything... So, how we shot that last scene was just a surprise to everybody, and no one was around. It was the end of the day, with just one camera operator, the director, and myself, and it was beautiful."