Like any job, acting can be tough if you fail to prepare correctly.
But unlike a lot of jobs, what an actor is expected to do on any given day can vary dramatically
depending on the project they're working on.
As a result, there are countless stories of actors being hilariously underprepared for
roles due to time constraints, overconfidence, and sometimes, just plain old bad luck.
Benedict Cumberbatch and the penguin doc
Benedict Cumberbatch has played everything from an American neurosurgeon-wizard to Sherlock
Holmes.
And with such an impressive résumé, you'd think voiceover would be a cinch for the actor.
But Cumberbatch has a very peculiar acting Achilles' heel: he can;t say "penguin".
"So why are these woodlands so attractive to pengwings?"
Cumberbatch apparently wasn't aware of this, and in 2009, took a voiceover gig for the
BBC documentary South Pacific, in which he struggled to pronounce the word almost every
single time.
"These are royal pengwings and they're about to have their first sighting of land in seven
months"
On The Graham Norton Show, Cumberbatch admitted his amazement that nobody working on the doc
corrected him.
"It's not just me sitting in a booth going I don't think I know how to say penguin, I'll
say pengwings.
It's mortifying"
Peter Weller and the RoboCop suit
The titular RoboCop was played by Peter Weller, who was hired to portray the character due
to his slight build and his strong jawline.
"(target shooting) This guy is really good.
He's not a guy.
He's a machine.
(blade sound)"
Weller had planned to spend several weeks getting used to walking around in the RoboCop
suit to make his movements seem natural.
However, due to the suit's last-minute tweaks, it wasn't ready ahead of time.
Weller was instead forced to begin shooting the day same it arrived on set.
"The suit was ready when it was ready" "The second that we cut, immediately, like
a team of Ferrari mechanics, these guys would go to work on me"
This was so frustrating for Weller that production had to be stopped for three days so he could
work with the suit.
The rigid, robotic movements audiences would soon associate with RoboCop were really a
byproduct of Weller learning to move without fighting against the suit.
Hugh Jackman's doughy Wolverine
To a lot of people, Hugh Jackman is Wolverine.
"Excuse me I'm Eric Lensherr and I'm Xavier Go f--- yourself"
The actor has put an astonishing amount of effort into physically portraying the character
— something which is especially notable in later movies in the X-Men series, where
Jackman appears way more ripped than he was in the first film in the franchise.
Jackman has since said that he was embarrassed by his physique in the first X-Men movie,
telling Stephen Colbert,
"I thought you could get into shape in 3 weeks… and I turned up and the director had to push
all the shirt off scenes to the very end four months later"
Director Bryan Singer may have pushed those shirtless scenes as long as he could, but
Jackman says he's still embarrassed about them.
Kit Harrington is buff, not a history buff
During the press tour for Pompeii, a film about what happened to Kit Harrington's abs
during a volcanic eruption, Harrington admitted that he hadn't done any research into the
actual destruction of the Roman city Pompeii in the year 79 A.D.
Instead, he told the BBC he just figured Hollywood always gets these things right.
"I'm ashamed to say I didn't do a whole amount of historical research, I took the script
as gospel.
[...] But I went after we wrapped.
[...] I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were very historically accurate.
I mean, we're a big-budget action movie and we're bound to take historical liberties.
But not many."
"We were very painstaking in re-creating Pompeii in Toronto."
Ewan McGregor and the lightsaber noises
Like millions of people, Ewan McGregor is a big fan of the Star Wars franchise, and
when he was cast as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequels, he had trouble setting aside his
childlike glee around his lightsaber.
"To begin with, it was quite difficult not to make the sound...zuuh.
And also when it goes away it makes that nice ssssssuk noise when it goes down"
The actor would later admit that he messed up quite a few takes because he couldn't help
making lightsaber noises whenever he swung his prop around.
According to a persistent rumor, a sound guy finally had to tell McGregor that they add
sound effects in post, when they noticed his humming noises were being picked up by the
boom mic.
Marlon Brando's clueless, tubby warrior
Marlon Brando's not-giving-a-crap during production was the stuff of legend.
Notoriously indifferent when it came to reading scripts and learning lines, Brando often turned
up on set completely unprepared.
"I think you've summed it up admirably"
Take Apocalypse Now, where Brando was so clueless about his role that production had to shut
down for an entire week so director Francis Ford Coppola could read the script to him
and explain his character.
Producer Fred Roos remembered,
"The whole company was sitting up on the set all poised to shoot and Francis and Marlon
would be talking about the character."
On top of this, the ending to the film had to be entirely rewritten because Brando, who
was playing "a lean and hungry warrior," weighed roughly 300 pounds.
To get around this, Coppola shot Brando almost exclusively in shadow and made him wear all
black—partly because there wasn't a Green Beret uniform to fit him.
Finn Jones' last-minute choreography
Fans and critics alike took issue with the subpar fight choreography of Marvel's Iron
Fist and its reliance on excessive cuts to hide actor Finn Jones' apparent lack of martial
arts skill—a fairly major problem, considering Iron Fist is supposed to be a master of all
forms of unarmed combat.
"When she sees how good of a fighter he is, that's when she starts to realize there's
something else about him"
Jones later explained that he literally had minutes to learn the choreography for his
fight scenes, revealing to The Telegraph,
“I was learning those fight scenes just 15 minutes before we shot them."
That, and he had only three weeks to train before filming started.
"But I'm Danny Rand and I am the Iron Fist"
James McAvoy and the haircut
When he learned he'd be playing Professor X in X-Men: First Class, James McAvoy naturally
assumed that since he was playing the bald-headed superhero previously played by Patrick Stewart,
the studio would want him to be similarly shorn.
"This is very important to me and if I can help you I will do my utmost"
He shaved off all his hair before filming started—but apparently the studio wanted
McAvoy to have hair for the role since it was set in the '60s, forcing the actor to
ask a hairstylist friend to add on hair extensions.
A wig was apparently also used for some scenes, though it's not clear which ones—which probably
means it was a pretty good wig.
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