20 Things You Somehow Missed In Raiders Of The Lost Ark
14. Michael Sheard Rose Quickly In The Nazi Party
Many actors had been in the running to portray Ronald Lacey's role of Gestapo agent, Major Arnold Toht, including Roman Polanski, who had been intrigued by the prospect of working with Steven Spielberg.
A far lesser known contender for the role was Michael Sheard, who lost out to Lacey, but went on to be cast in the smaller role of the U-boat's captain. You have to watch very closely for him as, even though several submariners appear in the film, the U-boat's captain gets the least amount of screen time. He is seen only fleetingly standing on the conning tower of the U-boat in the Nazis' island base, overlooking the tense conversation between Belloq and Wolf Kahler's Colonel Dietrich.
According to Sheard, he was to have had other scenes as the captain, but these were ultimately scrapped. Spielberg, always the nice chap that you would hopefully imagine him to be, promised to find Sheard a meatier role in the future. Sheard had to wait until the end of the decade, of course, but he appeared as Adolf Hitler himself in the brief but very memorable rally sequence set in Berlin in 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.