9 Lead Actors Who Were Fired From Movies
4. Anne Hathaway - Knocked Up
Reason For Termination: Genuine, Gross Creative Differences
The Judd Apatow juggernaut was well underway by the time Knocked Up hit theaters in 2007. Apatow, who had toiled away on cult television shows like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared early in his career, had recently become a hot commodity following the unlikely success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Knocked Up helped cement him as a director with a singular voice, largely because the stellar cast made his job easy. Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segal, and Jonah Hill all played incredibly well off each other.
In fact, the only real weak spot in the cast was Katherine Heigl, who most critics agreed was too stiff and uncharismatic to meld with the spirit of the film. So the question becomes, would Anne Hathaway have fared better?
Hathaway, whose star was shooting straight upward after the critical success of Brokeback Mountain and the commercial success of The Devil Wears Prada, had the role of journalist Alison Scott all through pre-production. Less of an outright firing and more of a "we'll open the door for you to leave" scenario, Hathaway expressed concerns with the realistic birthing scene near the end of the film and refused to do the movie if it wasn't changed.
Apatow refused to change it. The rest is history.
3. Richard Gere - Lords Of Flatbush
Reason For Termination: Fighting With Co-stars
To hear Sylvester Stallone explain it, Richard Gere was a stark raving a--hole on the set of the coming-of-age drama, Lords of Flatbush. The two young actors apparently couldn't find a way to get along on the set, and the result was Gere being cast off the movie that would have been his film debut.
Even in Sly's own re-telling, it's impossible to tell who the bigger jerk was between the two. Gere apparently got a little rough with Stallone during a rehearsal, but it was within the context of a fight scene, so it doesn't seem too implausible to think that Gere, who was super green, was simply being a tad overzealous.
Honestly, Sly seems like a bit of a wang for taking it so seriously. But things get bizarre very quickly when Stallone recounts a lunchtime feud between the two that went to blows over mustard and chicken grease. No really:
"It was lunchtime, so we decided to take a break, and the only place that was warm was in the backseat of a Toyota. I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper. I said, 'That thing is going to drip all over the place.' He said, 'Dont worry about it.' I said, 'If it gets on my pants youre gonna know about it.' He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay."