10 Planned Movie Scenes Actors Refused To Film

Much has been written about how The Shawshank Redemption's ending was laboured over by writer-director Frank Darabont, who originally ended the movie as Red (Morgan Freeman) took the bus towards the Mexican border to meet Andy (Tim Robbins), while leaving the outcome ambiguous.

But test screenings convinced him to include the subsequent crowd-pleasing reunion, despite him feeling it was a "commercial, sappy" ending.

Yet while Morgan Freeman was a strong supporter of the extended finale, he did object to perform one written part of the sequence which he felt went one trite step too far.

In a 2019 interview with The Daily News, Freeman said that Darabont originally had Red blowing on the harmonica to get Andy's attention when he arrives on the beach in Zihuatanejo - the very harmonica, of course, that Andy gifted him in prison earlier in the movie.

But Freeman felt that this affectation was "sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary, and overkill," and refused to do it.

Darabont ultimately decided to end the film on a basically silent reunion between the two that's ultimately way more effective - and affecting.