20 Actors Who Quit Movies During Production

LIke Yogi Berra said, it ain’t over till it’s over. Take a big Hollywood movie. An actor might have signed on the dotted line to play a role, they might have shown up for costume fittings and rehearsals — they might have even started shooting some scenes — but until the film is edited and released, you just never know what might happen.

Take, for example, the 20 actors listed below. They’re all big names who agreed to appear in one form or another in some very well-known films — most of which you have surely seen before. But somewhere between that initial deal and the movie’s opening date, something went wrong. Whether it was a scheduling issue, personal problems, studio meddling, or good old fashioned “creative differences,” another actor entirely wound up playing the parts they had previously planned to perform. (In at least one case, they had performed it, and fully finished their work, before they walked away from the movie. And the film in question was scheduled to open in theaters in only six weeks!)

Bear in mind that in a few of the cases below, there is some dispute over the exact nature of the actors’ departures. (Ask the actor and they might say they quit, while if you ask the director, they might say they fired Shia LaBeouf, to name one purely hypothetical example.) Whenever possible, I’ve done my best to present both sides of those debates. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the stars who dropped out of movies and had to be replaced:

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