Cheating in most things is universally frowned upon, but what about cheating in acting?
Turns out, it's totally cool for a thespian to cheat his or her way through a take, and
there are plenty of film superstars who can't be bothered to do the heavy lifting of learning
their scripts.
Let's take a look at some of the most famous actors who just couldn't memorize their lines
— and got creative instead.
"You don't understand.
I could've had class.
I could've been a contender."
The earpiece of Dr. Moreau
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly reported "expansive actor" Marlon Brando used an earpiece to help
him remember his lines on the set of the infamously troubled The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The story came a few months before the release of the film, and among the amazing stories
from the set about the film's disastrous production, the early news brief seemed almost quaint;
just a bit of inside info about a legendary actor phoning it in.
The story came from co-star David Thewlis, who claimed Brando would spout whatever was
coming from the earpiece, even interference from nearby police radios.
This led to Brando shouting non-sequiturs like "There's a robbery at Woolworths."
It's unlikely Brando actually shouted that line verbatim, and Thewlis probably just mentioned
it for comedic effect.
However, it's easy to believe that Brando totally cheated his way through his performance.
This is the same guy who insisted on having cue cards taped to the wall when filming The
Godfather.
"This is you doing a scene with Brando, and you have to hold the lines on your chest."
When asked why he wanted his lines printed out on cards, Brando reportedly said, "Because
I can read them that way."
Hard to argue with that logic.
50 takes of grey
Unlike Brando, British pop star-turned-actress Rita Ora gets a bit of a free pass for using
an earpiece during the filming of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015.
It was her first major film role, after all.
She told Access Hollywood,
"I had to have someone in my ear on set telling me what to say before I said it because I
was [...] so nervous, I forgot everything that I had learnt."
Of course, she omitted the part about only having a handful of lines in in the entire
film, one of which is "Uck, Seattle baseball."
Ora cites the "incredibly difficult" task of perfecting an American accent as one reason
she couldn't learn her lines as Mia, Christian Grey's sister, including real tongue-twisters
like, "She's here?" and "Oh my God, you exist."
Tough stuff.
Cruisin' for a bruisin'
Since the script for 1990's Top Gun-meets-NASCAR blockbuster Days of Thunder was constantly
being re-written, Tom Cruise had to cheat a little to get the job done during the film's
many high-speed racing scenes.
As you can imagine, this wasn't without its occupational hazards — at one point, Cruise
nearly killed himself by crashing his car after taping pages to its dashboard and trying
to read and drive at the same time.
So screenwriter Robert Towne started feeding Cruise his lines through a "radio earphone"
in his helmet.
Cruise admitted,
"So in the movie, when it looks like my crew chief is talking to me and I'm listening intently,
I was actually waiting for my next line."
Thanks for destroying the magic for millions, Tom.
(crazed laughter)
Davy Jones' liquor cabinet
How far Johnny Depp has fallen.
Just a few short years ago, he was cinema's bad boy, the witty alcoholic sea captain you
secretly wanted to be.
Several less-than-stellar Pirates of the Caribbean films and one spousal assault lawsuit later,
and the star of Edward Scissorhands is starting to look a lot more like that creepy older
guy your mom warned you not to date in high school.
And now this.
As part of a big, ugly lawsuit filed in 2017, Depp's managers claimed he couldn't even be
bothered to learn his lines for movies, instead shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars
to have a sound engineer read his lines over an earpiece.
The juicy allegations are part of an ongoing legal case that has seen Depp sue his managers
for allegedly treating his money like confetti.
His managers, for their part, have counter-sued him for being a real-life Jack Sparrow.
According to them, he drank the entire collection of vintage wine he'd "invested" tens of thousands
of dollars in.
So, the earpiece thing is just an allegation that may prove to be unfounded.
On the other hand, it would explain Depp's perma-perplexed expression in those Pirates
movies, as he visibly thinks to himself, "They actually want me to say this garbage?"
Cry on cue
The polite way to refer to famous drunks is to call them "legendary hellraisers."
Well, John Barrymore must have raised more hells than Clive Barker himself because the
early talkie star was the very definition of "drunk to the point of incapacity."
Barrymore was so soused he was barely capable of remembering how to fall over.
Legends of Barrymore say that by 1933, the one-time great was forced to use cue cards
in nearly every film he did.
The cheating started when Barrymore spent an entire day trying to memorize dialogue
for Counsellor at Law, only to realize his remaining brain cells were too sodden to retain
any information whatsoever.
From that point on, he turned into a kind of cue card artiste, hiding cards all over
the set so he could hit his lines.
Sadly, it was barely worth the effort.
Watch any post-1933 Barrymore film, and you'll see a man who is both clearly drunk and clearly
figuring out how to deliver a line as he's in the very process of delivering it.
It might be funny if it weren't so unspeakably tragic.
"What the hell I'm supposed to be looking at?
I don't know."
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