10 Things You Need To Know About Michael Bay's TMNT

4. Leonardo & Splinter Were Recast

In April of this year, a rather unexpected decision was made to recast the roles of Leonardo and Splinter in TMNT, retaining the physical, motion-captured performances but recasting the voices of the parts. Pete Ploszek and Danny Woodburn played Leonardo and Splinter respectively, and were subsequently replaced with Johnny Knoxville and Tony Shalhoub. While recasting is a frequent occurrence in Hollywood, it isn't so regular when production is in its latter stages, so we're left to believe that the vocal performances simply weren't up to the expected standard. Still, these are just voice roles, and can easily be recast and re-recorded in just a few short days (the same thing happened recently with Colin Firth shockingly dropping out of Paddington), so it's not the end of the world. Furthermore, hearing Knoxville and Shalhoub in the trailers, they sound pretty damn great, so it seems like a smart move on the whole.