20 Times Actors Bet Against Hollywood (And WON)

Talk about breaking bad, eh? 

Harmony Korine's brilliant (if polarizing) art-house crime flick is a haunting and visually sumptuous look at a spring break vacation descending into crime and violence for four college girls. One is played by Korine's then-wife Rachel Korine, another was played by Ashley Benson and the other two were played by actors no-one would've expected: Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens. 

Both had come up through the Disney Channel; Gomez had starred in Wizards of Waverly Place and Hudgens had co-led the High School Musical films. By starring as these drug-taking delinquents who spend most of the movie clad in bikinis, they took their previous image and threw it in the shredder. 

While this casting might've seemed gimmicky at first, it actually tied in to the movie's themes of the shallow, corrupt nature of modern celebrity culture and the way in which these actors jettisoned their squeaky-clean screen personas mirrored their characters' journeys of losing any semblance of innocence. 

Both actors did very well in the movie, so this unlikely venture was a win not just for them, but for A24 too. The presence of these actresses breaking bad made the overall film far more marketable than it would've been otherwise and what was actually an abstract, fairly inaccessible art-house film ultimately made a tidy profit.