20 Actors Who Quit Movies For Insane Reasons
These actors quit movies for strange and unexpected reasons.
Hollywood is an incredibly fickle, tricky business at the best of times, where deals can be made and broken for so many reasons.
Most of the time actors end up quitting roles for either scheduling reasons or basic creative differences, but sometimes it's a little weirder and more complicated than that.
Sometimes something unexpected arises which prompts an actor to hang things up and walk away, perhaps even leaving the production scrambling to find a replacement with little time before shooting is set to start.
And in the case of these 20 actors, it's safe to say that they quit these 20 movies for some wildly left-field and deeply strange reasons.
Perhaps they had a petty dispute with the director over something mundane, decided last-minute that they couldn't see themselves in the movie, or maybe just didn't want to miss watching their favourite sports team play.
The reasons are all certainly unexpected, though ultimately it's probably for the best that these actors realised their discomfort upfront rather than slog their way through the shoot and risk impacting the end product.
Considering that the casting replacements were mostly successful in the end, everything largely seemed to work out...
20. He Hated The Camera Rig - Robert Downey Jr. (Gravity)
Though George Clooney ultimately played the role of astronaut Matt Kowalski in Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, the part was originally intended for Robert Downey Jr.
But Downey ended up walking away from the film during pre-production, when he met with Cuarón to test out the camera rig being used to shoot the actors.
Due to the CGI-heavy nature of the film, the actors' performances were largely captured inside of a bespoke camera rig called a "lightbox," where thousands of LED bulbs were used to simulate outer space.
Because of the cumbersome nature of the rig, actors often had to spend hours at a time inside it, and would communicate with Cuarón through a headset.
The gravity of this all dawned on Downey when he tested the lightbox for just 20 minutes, at which point he realised that the experience would simply be too uncomfortable for him, and so he took his leave.
While every actor has their limits where comfort is concerned, it's genuinely surprising that Downey - an actor so well-versed in the laborious nature of blockbuster movie production by this point in time - was spooked by this groundbreaking shooting method.