1Matt Damon
After being assigned to create the first act of a play for his playwriting class, Matt Damon turned in a 40-some-odd-page document and said, “Look, I might have failed your class, but it is the first act of something longer.” This was later developed into the movie, ‘Good Will Hunting.’
2. Clint Eastwood fired Phillip Kaufamn as director of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and assumed the job himself. In response, the Directors Guild of America created the Eastwood Rule that prohibits an actor or producer from firing the director and then becoming the director himself.
3. George Clooney once pranked his friend by cleaning his friend’s cat litter box for days so that his friend would think that his cat did not poop. Then one day suddenly George took a dump in the box making it look like the cat took a huge dump after several days.
4. Hugh Jackman took a pay cut to ensure “Logan” would be rated R. Since ‘R-rated’ films typically limit the overall audience that can attend, Jackman’s reduced salary brought the budget down to an acceptable place to warrant an R rating.
5. During the filming of Schindler’s List (1993), when Ralph Fiennes was dressed in his full SS uniform as Nazi captain Amon Goeth, a Polish woman called out and said “how much she loved his uniform and wished ‘all of you were back here protecting all of us again.’” When a survivor of the concentration camp met him, however, she had the exact opposite reaction. She began to shake uncontrollably at the sight of him because he was so convincing.
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6Bruce Willis
In 2002, Bruce Willis’ daughter suggested giving Girl Scout cookies to troops. He bought 12,000 boxes and delivered them to troops stationed throughout the Middle East.
7. Jake Gyllenhaal tried out for the part of Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and heard back that it was one of the worst auditions they had. Gyllenhaal was not even aware he had to have a British accent for the role.
8. Morgan Freeman wears his earrings because they are just worth enough to pay for a coffin in case he dies in a strange place.
9. Dwayne Johnson was the 2nd person on earth to publicly report the news of Osama bin Laden’s death, only 47 seconds after a navy intel officer leaked it from official sources.
10. Due to the explosive popularity following the release of A New Hope, the cast was thrust into stardom so quickly that when Harrison Ford went to a record store to buy an album one day, enthusiastic fans tore half his shirt off.
11Daniel Day-Lewis
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.
12. 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.”
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. Ryan Gosling was cast in the movie ‘The Notebook’ because the director was looking for someone that was “not handsome” and “not cool.”
16Tom Hardy
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.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21Brad Pitt
Brad Pitt voluntarily went to a dentist to have his front teeth chipped for the role of Tyler Durden in Fight Club. His teeth were fixed after he finished making the movie.
22. The Oscar-nominated documentary “Liberators” narrated by Denzel Washington, interviewing African American soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp was pulled by PBS when an investigation showed no African American GI’s played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald.
23. Martha Stewart ended her relationship with Sir Anthony Hopkins after watching The Silence of the Lambs because she was unable to avoid associating Hopkins with the character of Hannibal Lecter.
24. Sean Connery was once filming a love scene when his co-star’s gangster boyfriend got jealous and pulled a gun on him. Connery grabbed the gun from his hand and twisted the guy’s wrist until he ran off the set.
25. Hollywood uses a measurement called Q scores to determine the likability of celebrities. The highest-ranking celebrities include Tom Hanks and Morgan Freeman with 48 points, while Kim Kardashian was determined to have to lowest Q score with -71.
