Inside Hollywood: 35 Awesome Facts About Your Favorite Actors – Part 4

Sylvester Stallone was not the actor that the producers wanted to star in 'Rocky'. With just $106 in his bank account, Stallone turned down a $300,000 offer — the equivalent of $1 million today — for the rights to 'Rocky' so that he could star in the film himself.

2. Clint Eastwood insisted on removing some of the dialogue in the original script for his character 'The Man with no Name' in the Dollars trilogy so that it could make the character more mysterious. As the trilogy progressed the character became even more stoic and silent.

3. Rory McCann ('The Hound', Game of Thrones) was incredibly anti-social until he learned that fellow actors in the show's group, the 'Brotherhood Without Banners' (Thoros, Lord Beric) were musicians, and formed a band called 'Brotherhood Without Banjos' with them.

4. Victor Mature, after being denied membership of the Los Angeles Country Club because he was an actor, replied: "I am not an actor - and I've got 64 films to prove it."

5. Actor John Banner, famous for his iconic role as Master Sergeant Hans Georg Schultz in CBS' Hogan's Heroes, was an Austrian-born Jew. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, and sadly, lost most of his family in the Holocaust.

Once during flight, actor Nicolas Cage as a prank used the PA system to say that he was the pilot and he was not feeling well. At the airport, police prepared to arrest Cage and his traveling partner Charlie Sheen. After Cage politely talked his way out of it, he later discovered that Sheen was carrying cocaine on him.

7. Matt Damon could only say his name in Team America because his puppet came in looking mentally deficient and they didn’t have time to change it, so Parker and Stone just made him mentally challenged.

8. Actor Mickey Rourke attributed his comeback to his dogs and credited them during his Golden Globe acceptance speech in 2009. “Sometimes when a man's alone, all you got is your dog, and they've meant the world to me.”

9. Actor Joe Pesci started as a singer and guitar player and played in the same band as Jimi Hendrix.

10. Actor Clint Walker was pierced through the heart with a ski pole. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, but a doctor detected faint signs of life and rushed Walker to surgery, where his damaged heart was repaired. Within two months Walker was again working.

An actor named Del Close died in 1999 and in his will, he bequeathed his skull to a local theatre so that he could still play the part of Yorick, a dead court jester, in productions of Hamlet. However, no one wanted to remove his head after death, robbing him of one of his final wishes.

12. Actor Rob Riggle was a Marine for 23 years. He was a lieutenant colonel, and has received a combat award for his service in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Liberia.

13. Actor Vinnie Jones still holds the record for the quickest yellow card in professional Football history: 3 seconds into a match.

14. David Zayas, the actor who played Detective Angel Batista in the show Dexter, was an actual police officer in the NYPD for 15 years.

15. For 4 years, Hugh Grant pretended to be his own talent agent under the name James Howe Ealy. He communicated with people via a fake email account and even disguised his voice with a Scottish accent on the phone. “I saved myself an absolute fortune,” he said.

Daniel Day-Lewis was so convincing as a killer in “Gangs of New York” that the mom of his 10-year-old co-star for “There Will Be Blood” saw the movie, and didn't want her son acting alongside him anymore. The studio sent her “The Age of Innocence” to reassure her Day-Lewis wasn't actually bad.

17. Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the role for Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels.

18. Morgan Freeman's talent for acting was discovered at age 12 when he was forced into a drama production as a punishment for teasing a girl in his class.

19. John Wayne, in a 1971 interview with Playboy, said: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or ten generations ago these people were slaves.”

20. Harrison Ford made $10,000 for A New Hope and $20,000,000 for The Force Awakens.

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.

22. When actor James Cagney received an honorary degree he surprised the university by submitting a paper on soil conservation.

23. Actor James Stewart was also a poet. Once, while on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, he read a poem called "Beau" that he had written about his dog. By the end, Carson had started crying.

24. When Jeff Bridges was 14, he and his brother, Beau, would go to grocery store parking lots and pretend to start a fight. Once a crowd gathered, they would both jump into the back of their pickup truck and proceed to do dramatic line readings.

25. Tom Cruise vandalized the world’s tallest building in 2010. During the filming of Mission: Impossible 4, he climbed to the top of the Burj Khalifa (without safety equipment) and etched Katie Holmes' name into the spire.