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These celebs really hope you don't read this one.
1. Robert Pattinson was called on to simulate masturbation in the 2008 film Little Ashes, but — when he felt his efforts weren't coming off realistic enough — he went ahead and did the deed on camera. In a 2013 interview with Germany's Interview magazine, Pattinson explained why he didn't just pretend. "Try it," he said. "I can tell you right now, no chance. It just doesn’t work."
PT Films/Aria Films
If masturbating on the set of a major motion picture sounds surreal, perhaps it's fitting that Pattinson was playing surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.
Pattinson was worried the self-love scene might ruin his career, but very shortly after production wrapped, he got the call telling him that he'd been cast in Twilight.
Axelle / FilmMagic / Getty Images
Funnily enough, Pattinson has played characters who masturbate onscreen in four other movies: High Life, Damsel, The Devil All the Time, and The Lighthouse. All of those scenes, though, were simulated.
2. Julianne Moore — an Academy Award–winning star — was shockingly fired from Can You Ever Forgive Me? by director Nicole Holofcener just six days before filming was scheduled to start.
Bravo/ Fox Searchlight, Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection
Moore told Andy Cohen, “Nicole fired me. So yeah, that’s the truth. I think she didn’t like what I was doing. I think that her idea of where the character was, was different than where my idea of where the character was.”
She added it was the first time she'd been fired since she was let go from a yogurt shop at age 15.
Co-star Richard Grant added some more detail, saying one big conflict between the director and star was that Moore wanted to wear a fat suit and false nose to more closely resemble the real-life person, Lee Israel, she would’ve portrayed.
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In the end, the film was made after a year’s delay, but without Moore or Holofcener. Marielle Heller took the reins as director and Melissa McCarthy played the lead role…and earned a Best Actress Academy Award nomination in the process. (No word on whether Moore can ever forgive Holofcener.)
3. Early rock n' roll star Jerry Lee Lewis (the high-energy pianist/singer behind "Great Balls of Fire") got married to his 13-year-old first cousin once removed, Myra Gale Brown. If that's not shocking enough, the marriage was the then 22-year-old singer's third marriage (and he technically was still married to wife number two when he married Myra).
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The marriage flew under the radar until Lewis and his new wife traveled overseas for a tour of England. There, he told a reporter who asked Myra's age that she was 15 (thinking that would make it acceptable), but it quickly became a massive scandal. The tour was cancelled after three dates, and Lewis and Myra returned to the United States where the news had caused an uproar, too. It probably didn't help that his current single was titled "High School Confidential."
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The scandal effectively ended his run atop the top of the rock n' roll charts, although he later had a successful country music career as its fans were more accepting of his marriage...which lasted another ten years.
In 1989, there was a movie about the marriage and scandal starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder entitled Great Balls of Fire!
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4. Chloë Sevigny and costar Vincent Gallo were filmed engaging in oral sex during the climax of the 2003 film Brown Bunny. Gallo, who also wrote and directed the movie, told Film Freak Central that when he pitched the project to Sevigny (with whom he'd had a previous relationship of sorts), he said, "Remember that night in Paris when I did that thing to you but you didn't do it to me because you weren't so into it? Well, you might have to do that. On film."
Wellspring
He went on to say that, to his eyes, the scene was needed to demonstrate the connection between male sexuality and self-loathing.
That the Academy Award–nominated Sevigny agreed to be in the scene was surprising, but she stood by her decision over a decade later. “I’d probably still do it today. I believe in Vincent as an artist, and I stand by the film,” she told Variety in 2016, adding, “It was a subversive act. It was a risk."
J. Vespa / WireImage / Getty Images
Unfortunately, the risk didn't pay off. The debut screening of the film at the Cannes Film Festival ended in massive boos, with famed film critic Roger Ebert calling it the worst film ever shown at the festival.
5. Gary Busey once refused to perform a scene set in heaven because he said the set design looked nothing like the real heaven he visited during a near-death experience.
Christopher Polk / FilmMagic, Sean Gladwell / Getty Images
A little backstory: The Academy-Award nominated star of 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story crashed his motorcycle in 1988 while not wearing a helmet. He hit his head on the curb, punching a half-dollar sized hole into the side of his head, and only survived because he was lucky enough to land at the feet of a police officer who raced him to the hospital — doctors later told Busey that if he'd arrived even three minutes later he'd have died.
Still, he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, and spent over four weeks in a coma. It was during this time Busey believes he entered a spiritual realm and visited heaven.
Fifteen years later Busey, arrived on the set of Quigley — a box-office bomb about a billionaire who dies and comes back to earth as a Pomeranian — and objected to the way the production design team had made heaven look. Busey’s co-star Curtis Armstrong (yes, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds), told the AVClub, “He looked around and said, 'It’s nothing like this. I’ve been to heaven, and it doesn’t look like this. That sofa’s all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They don’t even have mirrors!' It was ridiculous. He was completely nuts about the design of heaven.”
Destiney Entertainment Group
Things only got more absurd when another actor claimed he, too, had visited heaven after his own near death experience, and took issue with Busey’s description of the place.
Armstrong said, “This guy got into an argument with Busey about the way heaven looked! The two of them wound up coming to blows, and they had to send everybody home.”
6. Victor Salva — the writer and director of the popular Jeepers Creepers horror franchise — is a convicted child molester who spent 15 months in jail after sexually abusing the 12-year-old star of his first film Clownhouse.
United Artists / MGM
Salva pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 14, having oral sex with a child under 14, and procuring a child for pornography (he filmed the sexual acts with a boy). Despite this, Salva was able to make nine more films in Hollywood, including Powder, which was produced by Disney and released just six years after the release of Clownhouse.
Salva’s victim, Nathan Forrest Winters, picketed a theater screening Powder and held up signs that read: "Support the Victim, Not the Victimizer" and "Victor Salva: Writer, Director, Child Molester.”
Salva issued a statement saying he “deeply regretted his actions“ and “I paid for my mistakes dearly.” Powder was a box office success and lead to other opportunities for Salva like the Jeepers Creepers franchise.
Jeepers Creepers 3 producer Michael Ohoven told BuzzFeed News Salva’s crime was “absolutely repulsive and horrific,” but added, "I think often in life you're confronted with: Do you believe in redemption? Are you willing to give second chances? And again, I'm not advocating for anybody, or trying to make anybody's decision. But I had to make the decision to say, Look, I believe he is a man who's done something absolutely horrific some 30 years ago. I believe he has turned his life completely around."
Dale Wilcox / WireImage for LIONSGATE / Getty Images
There was some controversy when Jeepers Creepers 3 was released because a version of the film screened for critics included a scene where characters discuss how the 18-year-old heroine had to go live with her grandparents at 13 because her stepfather began “making overtures at her.”
“Can you blame him though?” One character says to the other. “I mean, look at her.” The other replies, “The heart wants what it wants, am I right?”
The scene was cut from the released version.
7. A young Melanie Griffith was clawed across the face by a lion and nearly lost an eye while filming Roar, a movie costarring 70+ untrained lions that injured nearly 100 cast and crew members.
Atlas Media Corporation / Animal Planet
Griffith's mom Tippi Hedren (famous for starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) became enchanted by lions while making a movie in Africa and hatched an idea to make a film with her husband Noel Marshall starring the animals.
Back in Los Angeles, the couple started acquiring young lions from zoos and circuses and kept them in their Sherman Oaks home. This was illegal, so when the authorities ordered them to get rid of the animals, they built a home/movie set in the more rural Soledad Canyon where they kept the animals and planned to shoot their film. Oh, and they kept acquiring exotic animals, eventually totaling (in part) 71 lions, 26 tigers, nine black panthers, 10 cougars, two jaguars, four leopards, and two elephants.
Working with the animals proved difficult — and dangerous — and the planned five-month film shoot stretched to five years. The lions mainly did two things: A) NOT what the filmmakers wanted, and B) injured the cast and crew. Melanie Griffith needed plastic surgery after her run-in with a lion, cinematographer Jan de Bont (who would go on to direct Speed) got scalped and needed 220 stitches, and 70–100 others were injured.
Paul Harris / Getty Images
Marshall and Hedren didn’t escape unscathed — Marshall was diagnosed with gangrene after being bitten so many times, and Hedren was hospitalized after a lion attack and later had her ankle shattered by an elephant.
So what was the result of all this? A hit movie? Nope. The resulting film, Roar, was a box office bomb, and Hedren and Marshall divorced shortly after its release.
8. Matt Damon reprised his Ocean's 11 character Linus Caldwell in Ocean's 8, the woman-lead reboot of the Ocean's 11 series, but was left on the cutting room floor. The reason? His comments about Harvey Weinstein, which were described as "thoughtless and sexist" in a petition calling for his removal from the film.
Warner Bros.
The comments the petition referred to were ones Damon made in an interview with ABC News where he condemned Weinstein and abusers, but added that not all misconduct claims "belong in the same category" and that there was a "spectrum of behavior." Damon later apologized.
Michael Stewart / WireImage / Getty Images
“I really wish I’d listened a lot more before I weighed in on this," he said. "I don’t want to further anybody’s pain with anything that I do or say. So for that I am really sorry. A lot of those women are my dear friends and I love them and respect them and support what they’re doing and want to be a part of that change…but I should get in the back seat and close my mouth for a while.”
9. Ed Norton played Bruce Banner/Hulk in The Incredible Hulk, but was dismissed from the role in the most awkward way possible — a statement released by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige that read in part, “We have made the decision to not bring Ed Norton back to portray the title role of Bruce Banner in The Avengers. Our decision is definitely not one based on monetary factors, but instead rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members.” Ouch.
© Universal / Courtesy Everett Collection
A reason for the animosity? Marvel and Norton had squabbled over the final cut of The Incredible Hulk. Norton wanted a 135-minute version, while Marvel wanted the movie under two hours. Making matters worse, the studio’s plans to shorten the movie included cutting a lot of the scenes Norton himself had written. Later, when it came time to promote the film, Norton was often unavailable.
Norton's agent, Brian Swardstrom, fired back, saying, “Edward was looking forward to the opportunity to work with Joss (Whedon, director of The Avengers) and the other actors in The Avengers cast, many of whom are personal friends of his. Feige's statement is unprofessional, disingenuous and clearly defamatory. Mr. Norton's talent, tireless work ethic and professional integrity deserve more respect, and so do Marvel's fans.” The role, of course, later went to Mark Ruffalo.
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
10. On a drug- and alcohol-fueled tour in 1984, Ozzy Osbourne — in an effort to gross out his tour mates Mötley Crüe — peed on the ground next to a swimming pool and drank his own urine, then used a straw to snort a line of ants.
Hulton Archive / Getty Images, en.wikipedia.org Domain, Hans Neleman / Getty Images
Ozzy's guitarist at the time, Jake E. Lee, contests the story, saying he snorted a spider instead of ants. He does, however, corroborate the urine-drinking story, adding the unappealing detail that the urine was green because Ozzy was taking a lot of vitamins. Lee added, “That's where I said, 'Okay, I'm outta here. Not only is that happening, there's families on the other side of the pool – children and mothers and fathers looking horrified, like, 'What the fuck is going on over there?’”
11. Lori Petty — the star of Point Break and A League of Their Own — was originally the female lead in Demolition Man, but was let go after just three days of filming and replaced by Sandra Bullock in her first major role.
20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. / Everett Collection
According to Petty, part of the problem was that she and co-star Sylvester Stallone got along like “oil and water,” but there were also reports that the studio didn’t like the dailies of her scenes. Whatever the truth is, she may have dodged a bullet. Nigel Hawthorne, who co-starred in the movie, called the production a “miserable experience” and claimed the egos of the stars and producer Joel Silver were out of control.
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Years later, Petty (who went on to star on Orange is the New Black) had this to say about Silver: “I just treat people the way I want to be treated, so I’d rather not gossip about his unkindness.”
12. Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose can be heard having sex with Adriana Smith — the girlfriend of the band's drummer Steven Adler — on the 1987 song "Rocket Queen."
Paul Natkin / Getty Images
On the day the sex was recorded, Smith had just been told by Adler that he didn't consider her to be his girlfriend, so she went to the studio to hang with two of the band's other members, Axl Rose and Slash, in hopes of making Adler jealous. That's when Rose approached her with an unorthodox idea — to record her having sex with him and put the sounds over the bridge of the song.
Paul Natkin / Getty Images
Smith told VH1, "Axl came and he laid his head in my lap and became all serious. And he looked at me and said, 'Adriana, I want to talk to you about something that’s very serious and very special and important to me, and nobody else will do this.'" Smith said she replied, "For the band, sure, no problem, for the band! And a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
At that point, they ran into a problem: The sound engineer didn't want to be involved mic'ing and recording these shenanigans, so his assistant Vic Deyglio had to set everything up. Deyglio later told Rolling Stone, "It was like a Ron Jeremy set in there," and ended up being credited in the album's liner notes as "Victor 'the fucking engineer' Deyglio."
Once microphones were laid on the floor of the vocal booth, the lights were dimmed, and Rose and Smith commenced having sex.
The song became notorious in the wake of the album's success, and Smith later regretted taking part in it. She said that Adler "fucking freaked out" after learning what happened and that the whole experience left her lost: “I ended up drinking and using drugs over this for a really long time, because I had this extreme shame and guilt and stuff.”
Vh1
13. Bruce Willis was offered the lead role of Sam Wheat in the global smash and Academy Award Best Picture nominee Ghost opposite his then-wife Demi Moore, but turned it down.
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The part, of course, went to Patrick Swayze who ended up canoodling with Willis' wife onscreen in a career-defining hit. "I wish I had not turned down the part that Patrick Swayze eventually played in Ghost," Willis told Ain't It Cool News. "I simply could not see how a romance between a ghost and a living person would work."
He added, "It would have been nice to have worked with Demi again." (The couple had co-starred in the thriller Mortal Thoughts.) Another film he probably wished people didn't know he turned down? Ocean's 11 — he would've played Andy Garcia's part.
Ron Galella, Ltd. / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
14. Will Smith would also probably prefer people didn't know that he turned down Keanu Reeves' role of Neo in the landmark film The Matrix. A pitch meeting with the Wachowskis' (the filmmakers) had left Smith a little confused by the concept, and he wasn't sure of the film's commercial prospects, so he passed.
Ronald Siemoneit / Sygma via Getty Images
Makings things even worse is that the movie Smith chose to film instead was Wild Wild West...an infamous box office bomb.
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15. In 1995 Hugh Grant was arrested in Hollywood for receiving oral sex in a public place from a sex worker named Divine Brown. The British star, who was dating fellow actor Elizabeth Hurley at the time, quickly released a statement: "Last night I did something completely insane. I have hurt people I love and embarrassed people I work with. For both things I am more sorry than I can ever possibly say."
Ted Soqui / Sygma / Via Getty Images, Steve Granitz / WireImage / Via Via Getty
This was very bad timing as it happened just 18 days before the release of his first Hollywood star turn in Nine Months.
20th Century Fox
To address the scandal, Grant appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and so many people tuned in that it beat The Late Show with David Letterman in the ratings for the first time in a year. Leno got right to it, asking Grant, “What the hell were you thinking?”
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Tonight Show with Jay Leno / NBC / youtube.comGrant replied, "I think you know in life what's a good thing to do and what's a bad thing, and I did a bad thing. And there you have it." He had a similarly even-keeled response on Larry King Live, saying, "In the end you have to come clean and say 'I did something dishonorable, shabby and goatish.'" In response, CNN wrote, "By apologizing publicly, Grant has taught celebrities facing scandals in the future a lesson in how to defuse a crisis."
The campaign to rehabilitate Grant's image (quickly) worked — Nine Months became the biggest comedy of the summer, grossing $138 million worldwide.
Grant later pleaded no contest to the crime and, after paying a fine, was placed on two years probation and ordered to complete an AIDS education program.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images, Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
In 1969, Dennis picked up a couple hitchhiking girls who turned out to be part of Manson's group. Dennis went on to help Manson meet music industry people (including Terry Melcher, whose home Sharon Tate moved into), and rewrote a Manson tune "Cease to Exist" as "Never Learn Not to Love" that the Beach Boys released as a B-side.
17. Ellen Pompeo played Naomi, the ex-girlfriend of Joel (Jim Carrey) in the critically-acclaimed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but ended up having her part cut out of the final film.
Focus Features
One big reason is likely because if they put too much focus on the relationship between Joel and Naomi, it might have distracted from the core relationship between Joel and Clementine (Kate Winslet). This video essay takes a deep dive into why cutting Pompeo's part was the right call.
But another potential factor was Jim Carrey's reaction to the casting of Pompeo, believing that director Michel Gondry cast her because of her resemblance to Carrey's real life ex Renée Zellweger. Carrey told Vanity Fair, “I was pretty hurt. Michel likes to have real feelings in the scene and real chemistry, so he hired Ellen Pompeo, who’s a wonderful actress. But she reminded me completely of Renée. Her look was similar. And I said, Bastard! And it ends up that she’s not even in the movie.”
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18. Action star Jean-Claude Van Damme played the title character in Predator — briefly — before being fired and replaced by Kevin Peter Hall.
Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox
What exactly went wrong isn’t totally clear (this Hollywood Reporter deep dive is the closest we may ever get to the truth), but it seems Van Damme arrived on set expecting to show off his martial arts skills but was instead fitted with a gigantic alien mask that limited his mobility and restricted his air so much that he kept passing out. Van Damme either quit, was angrily fired by producer Joel Silver, or was no longer the right fit for the role when the costume was redesigned for a 7-foot man.
Marc Piasecki / Getty Images
Whatever the truth, the disappointment was short-lived for Van Damme. Eight months after the release of Predator, the Muscles from Brussels scored his own hit as the star of Bloodsport.
19. In 2006, actors Adam Brody, Jenna Dewan, and Kristin Cavallari began production on a remake of the '80s comedy Revenge of the Nerds, but it was never finished.
Michael Loccisano / Getty Images, Neilson Barnard / Getty Images
The movie filmed for two weeks before the production company Fox Atomic pulled the plug. Why? Well, it seems two things went wrong — Georgia's Emory University rescinded their agreement to let the production film on campus after reading the script, and film dailies weren't impressing Fox Atomic executives.
20th Century Fox
20. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo were so drunk on the set of Super Mario Bros. that Hoskins broke his finger.
Buena Vista Pictures
The big-screen adaptation of the classic video game ended up a critically panned box office disaster, and it seems everyone knew that would be its fate very early in production. So, according to Leguizamo's autobiography, the onscreen Mario and Luigi spent a lot of their days dipping into Hoskins' scotch to make the experience less interminable.
Unfortunately, during one take, an inebriated Leguizamo was behind the wheel of their characters' van (not a good idea!) when he hit the gas too fast and the door closed on Hoskins' hand, breaking his finger. If you look closely, you can see Hoskins wears a cast on his finger at times in the movie.
21. Filmmaker Ed Solomon, who co-wrote all three Bill & Ted's films, was — very briefly — a prime suspect in the grisly Night Stalker murder spree.
Ben Gabbe / Getty Images, Orion Pictures Corp / Courtesy Everett Collection
Solomon tweeted the whole wild story, explaining that one night in August of 1985 he was awakened by a phone call asking, "Are you the Night Stalker?" He hung up, thinking it was a prank, but the calls kept coming. Soon he was talking to a reporter who explained his car had been found at the scene of a murder by the Night Stalker. Solomon then saw police approaching his doorstep.
Solomon, it should go without saying, wasn't the Night Stalker, and the visit by the police was largely a formality as they'd pretty much already determined Solomon wasn't the guy. The car found at the scene, it turned out, was one Solomon had co-signed on for a friend, which the friend later gave away to someone else before it was stolen by Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker.
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Interestingly, Solomon's friend (in a note Solomon added to his Twitter thread), said that prints found in the car helped lead to the capture of Ramirez, so in a roundabout way Solomon and his one-time car played a small role in catching the Night Stalker. Insert an epic Bill and Ted "Whoa!" here.
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