10 Movies That Tried To Fool You Into Thinking An Actor Was In The Film
6. Oliver Reed - Gladiator
How the folks behind the historical epic that is Gladiator managed to pull this feat off a whopping two decades ago is still hard to comprehend to this day.
On the back of one particularly heavy night of drinking, British movie star Oliver Reed died in 1999 mid-way through shooting for Ridley Scott's film. Back then, throwing together a CGI version of Reed and finishing off the rest of his scenes via digital restoration wasn't as common a back-up plan as it is today. But that still didn't stop the visual effects team working their asses off to lace a digital version of Reed's face on top of a double's for various wide shots and other moments throughout the feature.
When that simply wasn't an option, outtakes and even the same pieces of footage used earlier in the movie were substituted in to fool audiences into thinking Reed was actually present on set.
Though the film's visual effects supervisor Rob Harvey wasn't completely convinced by the end result, his work helped get Reed posthumously nominated for a BAFTA a few years later. So, you definitely have to class that as making the best of a terrible situation.