20 Times Actors Bet Against Hollywood (And WON)
6. Henry Fonda - Once Upon A Time In The West
Early on in Sergio Leone's masterpiece of a Western, a family is massacred by a group of gunslingers. Towards the end of the sequence, only a little boy is left alive and he stares with terror into the face of the gang's leader.
He's staring into the handsome face of none other than Henry Fonda, with his famous blue eyes glittering with cruel malice as he shoots the boy. It's hard to imagine the shock contemporary audiences must have felt when first watching this scene, for Fonda was overwhelmingly associated with heroic everyman characters.
Well, here's the thing. Leone and Fonda both knew exactly what they were doing here; Fonda playing such a different role made this character even more frightening and it was one of the many ways in which Leone tried to subvert the mythology of the Wild West with this movie.
This was such a radical departure from Fonda's usual material that even Fonda himself was initially hesitant. He called up his friend and fellow actor Eli Wallach, who worked with Leone on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Wallach urged Fonda to take the leap and so Fonda did. The result was one of the greatest against-type movie performances of all time.