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1. Jeremy Renner wasn't a fan of Hawkeye's role as the resident brainwashing victim on the team in The Avengers, so much so that he suggested killing off the character then and there.
During a 2016 Q&A at the London Film and Comic Con, Renner described his dissatisfaction with being "Loki's minion." Said Renner, "I said, ‘I’m giving you an option, if you just want to kick me out of this movie. Just you know, at any given moment, if you wanna kill me off, daddy’s gonna be having a heart attack.'"
But fear not, HawkHeads, it's not all bad news. Renner went on to say, "I don’t really want him to die now. I really got to explore him a lot, and I can’t wait to explore him more, and there’s some really cool ideas coming up."
In addition to his dissatisfaction with Hawkeye's plot line, Renner told Men's Health that he threatened to leave the Marvel Cinematic Universe altogether if he wasn't given enough time to spend with his daughter, Ava. Renner recalled, "I said, ‘Fine, recast me. I’m going to be here with my daughter.’ It was pretty gnarly.”
2. The elaborate costume and makeup Jim Carrey had to wear (and endure) while filming How the Grinch Stole Christmas was so brutally uncomfortable that after his first day of filming, he told the director he couldn't be in the movie.
During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Carrey said that applying the makeup, which he compared to being "buried alive," took eight and a half hours on that ill-fated first day. Afterward, Carrey "put my leg through the wall" of his trailer before telling director Ron Howard that he was done.
Producer Brian Grazer was able to convince Carrey to stay by hiring an unexpected on-set expert, whom the actor described as a "gentleman who is trained to teach CIA operatives how to endure torture." The anti-torture consultant advised Carrey to eat often, distract himself with television, ask someone to smack him when he was spiraling, and smoke a frankly un-Grinch-like amount of cigarettes.
Carrey laughingly recalled that in order to stop his yak fur costume from igniting, he would have to smoke his prescribed cigarettes using a long, 1920s-style cigarette holder.
3. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was so adamant that the film Rampage have a happy ending that he threatened to leave if his character's gorilla companion George got killed off.
Johnson fought for George's survival for two months before the producers relented. He told Rolling Stone, "I don’t like a sad ending. Life brings that shit — I don’t want it in my movies. When the credits roll, I want to feel great."
He added, "My problem is I have a relationship with an audience around the world. For years I’ve built a trust with them that they’re gonna come to my movies and feel good. So every once in a while, you have to drop this card, which is: You’re gonna have to find another actor. We need to figure something out, otherwise I’m not gonna do the movie."
4. Emma Watson considered leaving the Harry Potter franchise and her role as Hermione Granger behind before filming began on the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
During the HBO Max reunion special Harry Potter: Return to Hogwarts, Watson told her co-star Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley), "I think I was scared. I don’t know if you ever felt like it got to a tipping point when you were like, ‘This is kind of forever now.'” David Yates, the director of Order of the Phoenix, recalled that when he got the job, he was told that "Emma is not sure she wants to come back and do another Potter."
She pointed to the fact that the "fame thing had finally hit home in a big way" as the reason for her hesitation, but added that "no one had to convince me to see it through." Said Watson, "The fans genuinely wanted us to succeed, and we all genuinely had each other’s backs. How great is that?”
5. Nicole Kidman wanted to back out of Being the Ricardos after there was backlash against her being cast as Lucille Ball. During an appearance on Live With Kelly and Ryan, Kidman said, "When the, sort of, the reality of playing her hit me, I went, 'What have I said yes to?' To which I then went, 'Oh no, I'm not right, everyone thinks I'm not right, so I'm going to try to sidestep this.'"
But director Aaron Sorkin told her she couldn't leave the role. According to Jezebel, Kidman said during a screening that she sent Sorkin an email that said, "I think I’m actually the wrong person now. I know I said 'yes,' but I’m now saying 'no.'” But Sorkin replied, "You don’t get to say 'no' now!" The actor said she was "really glad that he pushed me."
6. Emma Thompson threatened to quit Brideshead Revisited in protest after she got wind of another actor being body-shamed by producers.
According to E! Online, Thompson told the story on the Norwegian Swedish TV show Skavlan. When another (unnamed) woman in the cast was told to lose weight, Thompson said she told a producer, "If you speak to her about this again on any level, I will leave this picture. You are never to do that." She described the actor in question as "absolutely exquisite."
Thompson said about body-shaming, "It's evil what's happening, what's going on out there, and it's getting worse."
7. Michelle Rodriguez wanted to leave The Fast and the Furious unless a major change was made to the romantic storyline of her character Letty Ortiz.
Originally, Letty was going to cheat on her boyfriend with another man. Rodriguez told the Daily Beast, "They just followed the format without thinking about the reality of it. Is it realistic for a Latin girl who’s with the alpha-est of the alpha males to cheat on him with the cute boy? I had to put my foot down."
She went on, "I basically cried and said I’m going to quit and, ‘Don’t sue me, please — I’m sorry, but I can’t do this in front of millions of people.'" Rodriguez's co-star Vin Diesel was on her side and told her, "I got your back. Chill out and let me handle this, and you’re right — it makes me look bad anyway." Rodriguez called this moment "the beginning of the Letty fairy tale."
8. During an appearance on the Skimm's "Texting With" Instagram series, Jennifer Garner recalled that her co-star Mark Ruffalo almost quit 13 Going on 30 because he hated rehearsing for the "Thriller" dance scene.
Garner said, "Our first rehearsal, I think it was like Mark, Judy [Greer], and me, and Judy and I were both dancers growing up, and poor Mark didn't know that. And he came in and hated the rehearsal process so much, he almost dropped out of the movie."
9. Jamie Foxx wasn't sure if he could finish The Soloist, a biopic about the life of Nathaniel Ayers, a gifted musician with schizophrenia who is experiencing homelessness when he is discovered by a writer for the Los Angeles Times, because embodying the lead role became extremely psychologically taxing.
Foxx told the Indianapolis Recorder, "It was something that I enjoyed, but it shredded me. I went to places that I never thought I would ever go. I just remember being in my bathroom broke down, talking to my manager like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this.’"
He added, "You had to lose your mind every day you’re on set, and sometimes you didn’t have enough time to get your mind back before the weekend." Foxx's manager recommended that he should consult a psychiatrist, something that Foxx said he now does on a regular basis for roles, since he "had no idea that the mind could be that fragile."
10. During a 2014 interview with Marc Maron on his podcast WTF With Marc Maron, Mike Myers revealed that he threatened to quit Wayne's World if the Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody" wasn't featured.
Originally, the car singalong scene was supposed to use a song by Guns N’ Roses. But Myers, motivated by both his love for the song and his worry that Queen was fading from the public consciousness, fought for it to be "Bohemian Rhapsody" instead. Said Myers, "I thought it was a masterpiece. So I fought really, really hard for it. And at one point I said, 'Well I’m out, I don’t want to make this movie if it’s not ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.'"
11. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Ian McKellen's character Gandalf the Grey was supposed to be much taller than the other fantastical creatures, hobbits included, with whom he interacts. To achieve this effect, McKellen had to film many of his scenes alone in front of a green screen, an isolating experience that led the actor to not only consider leaving the film, but acting altogether.
During his DVD commentary, McKellen said, "I felt pretty miserable…and thought perhaps, has the time come for me to stop acting altogether if I can't cope with these difficulties? ... It was so distressing and off-putting and difficult that I thought, 'I don't want to make this film if this is what I'm going to have to do.' It's not what I do for a living. I act with other people; I don't act on my own."
Director Peter Jackson noticed how distraught his Gandalf was, noting in commentary that he and the rest of the crew "felt sorry for him being dumped in green screen land." To cheer up McKellen, they all celebrated Gandalf Appreciation Day on set.
12. During a 2017 appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Lily Tomlin (along with her co-star Jane Fonda) recalled how she wanted to quit 9 to 5 after the first week of filming.
Tomlin said she was reluctant to take the role in the first place because she "didn't want to do a cheap comedy." Despite the fact that she was "looking for something more serious," Tomlin took the gig after Fonda, who was also producing the film, spent a year trying to get her on board.
After the first week, Tomlin asked Fonda's fellow producer to let her out of her contract; she even tried to return the money she'd earned for the few days of shooting she'd done. Apparently, Tomlin got cold feet after watching a scene she'd done with animated birds (that weren't, of course, present in the scene yet) and thinking, "Oh, I'm going to be horrible in this."
But when she saw herself in a different scene the day after, Tomlin realized she was actually "so good." So she "begged" Fonda to let her back in the movie. Fonda, of course, obliged.
13. Lil Rel Howery told BET.com that he almost quit the hidden camera prank comedy Bad Trip on the first day of filming, because he was afraid the Netflix project would result in actual violence.
Howery said, "The first day was the craziest first day of anything I've ever shot, it was like, 'Okay, I'm gonna get murdered the first day, this is crazy. I don't know if I can do this, I quit.'"
Despite those first-day jitters, he stuck around, and said about filming the pranks, "When you become these characters you have to stay those characters. There’s no getting out of there. Usually you have all these takes. We just had these pranks and we have to be committed to it. And that’s the only way it’s gonna work. And as long as I can convince people that this stuff is really happening."
14. Chris Hemsworth told Variety that he almost quit Ghostbusters the night before filming began because promised changes hadn't been made to the script.
Hemsworth said, "The night before I was shooting, I almost pulled out. Three or four weeks prior, [director] Paul [Feig] said to me, ‘I’m going to write up the character. Don’t worry.’ And then I got the script and nothing had changed.”
Hemsworth met with Feig about his concerns, and the director reassured him that he could develop his character, receptionist Kevin Beckman, using improv. Said Hemsworth, "I was really scared walking onto that set. I had no real plan, so I was just feeding off of them, and I just felt ridiculous. So I used that."
15. And finally: Rita Moreno almost walked away from the role of Anita in the original West Side Story over offensive song lyrics about Puerto Rico.
During an appearance on ABC News' 20/20 special "Something's Coming: West Side Story," Moreno recalled that the original lyrics to "America" disparaged her native Puerto Rico as an "ugly island" afflicted by "tropic diseases."
Said Moreno, "And it felt awful. It felt horrible. And I thought, 'I can't do this. I can't do this to my people.' I got this close to not doing it." When Moreno received a new script shortly thereafter, the lyrics had been changed, and Puerto Rico was now referred to as "my heart's devotion." Moreno ultimately won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Anita.
