An actor's job is to act. If an actor fails to make us believe that they are a character, they have basically failed at doing their job. Unsurprisingly, this is at the forefront of the mind of the film producer when it comes to casting an actor in a role. For the acting community, though, very little is considered to be more shameful than for filmmakers to lose faith in your performance. One of the ultimate humiliations in such an eventuality is having your voice dubbed out of the movie or TV show entirely. Here, we catalog 9 of the cruelest dub-outs to have occurred over the years...
9. Jeff East - Superman
If you're a 20-year-old actor and you've just been cast as the young Superman, you have every reason to get insanely excited. Out of everyone else who auditioned, they picked you to play the young Christopher Reeve. And then you... okay, we're going to stop talking like this now, it's getting confusing. It's kind of strange to consider that the casting team must have chosen Jeff East largely due to his all round likeness to a young Reeve. Imagine Jeff's surprise and disappointment when he found out that they were unhappy with the vocal differences between the two actors and eventually settled on removing East's dialogue and replacing it with a dubbed over Christopher Reeve, doing his best young Christopher Reeve impression. Cruel for the sake of cruel, I think. When interviewed on the subject Jeff stated:
" not happy about it because the producers never told me what they had in mind! It was done without my permission ... Chris did a good job, but it caused tension between us!"
The only audio of East's performance that remained was a solitary "Woo-hoo!" How ironic.