12 Movies That Cast MAJOR Actors (Just To Die)

Before being cast in Oscar darling The Hurt Locker, future-Hawkeye Jeremy Renner was probably best known for playing serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in a low budget true crime horror and for his supporting role as a zombie-killing soldier in 28 Weeks Later. Director Kathryn Bigelow made sure, then, to surround her lead with some better known stars.

Rather than Renner, the movie opens on the far more familiar face of Guy Pearce as a bomb disposal expert and our way into the film's world of improvised Iraqi explosive devices.

Just when we've got comfortable with the idea that the tense opening scene is designed to show the process of dealing with such devices, the cast's biggest name explodes.

It's a shocking moment that tells the audience quite how hazardous the job of bomb disposal is and asks questions of what kind of person puts themselves in a place where even an expert can get blown up in the blink of an eye.

This wasn't the last time that the Memento and LA Confidential star would show up in an incidental role just to die. The ending to Prometheus had him emerge in old-age makeup and prosthetics only to be almost immediately dispatched by The Engineer.