10 Movie Moments Actors Didn't Know Were Coming
3. Gabriel Byrne Thought He Was Keyser Soze - The Usual Suspects
From around the halfway mark of The Usual Suspects, when the name was first spoken about properly, the entire movie became a guessing game surrounding the identity of the elusive Keyser Soze. The man had stayed in the shadows, and was almost a myth to the criminal world, but had been pulling strings from the beginning.
The closest anyone came to speaking to Keyser Soze on screen was when the villain used Pete Postlethwaite's Kobayashi as a middle-man. Even then, however, no one could have seen it coming that Kevin Spacey's Verbal Kint was actually the murderous villain.
The twist and the reveal worked perfectly, and were potentially so effective because even the cast of the movie had no idea what was going on. According to Kevin Spacey, director Bryan Singer convinced every major actor in the film that they were Keyser Soze, with the truth not being revealed until the finished product was screened for them.
This would have surprised Benicio Del Toro, Stephen Baldwin, and Kevin Pollack, but it was Gabriel Byrne who took exception to this the most. He thought that he was at the center of the big twist of the movie, and when he found out he wasn't, apparently argued with Singer for half an hour afterward.