35 Little Known Facts About Popular Hollywood Actors – Part 6

Daniel Day-Lewis hasn’t appeared on stage since 1989 after he played Hamlet and claimed to see the ghost of his own father during the performance.

Gloria Steinem talked Leonardo DiCaprio out of playing Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, saying, “Please, please don’t do this to those girls. The eyes of all 13-year-old girls are upon you and you can’t play a guy that tortures and kills women.”

Keanu Reeves was initially offered Val Kilmer’s role in the 1995 film Heat. He turned it down to play Hamlet in a 789 seat theatre in Manitoba.

When Robin Williams appeared on ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ in 2001, an audience member developed a hernia from laughing too hard and had to be taken away in an ambulance.

Ryan Gosling was cast in the movie ‘The Notebook’ because the director was looking for someone that was “not handsome” and “not cool.”

Tom Hardy was addicted to drugs and alcohol in his mid-20s. At one point he said that he was 'out of control' on drink and drugs before he turned his life around, and was lucky that he did not contract HIV while he was at his lowest.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had been sober for 23 years until he accepted an alcoholic beverage to celebrate the completion of ‘The Master.’ This resulted in relapse, after which he started to use prescription medication and the following year he was using heroin.

William Shatner is a trained Shakespearean stage actor. He was once considered an equal to Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford, but hurt his career by taking any offered role regardless of quality. That contributed to Shatner joining a no-name cast for 'Star Trek' in 1966.

In ‘Tropic Thunder,’ Robert Downey Jr.’s character says “I don’t drop character ‘til I’ve done the DVD commentary.” When doing the actual DVD commentary for the movie, RDJ does it in the characters Lincoln Osiris and Kirk Lazarus.

In 1974, Time magazine researchers learned, and informed Jack Nicholson (who was 37 at that time), that his sister was actually his mother, and his mother was his grandmother.