From Natalie Portman to Ryan Gosling, these stars were hired, fired, and replaced before cameras rolled. And only one of them managed to get their job back.

9 stars who were cast in movies — and fired before filming began

From Natalie Portman to Ryan Gosling, these stars were hired, fired, and replaced before cameras rolled. And only one of them managed to get their job back.

August 4, 2026 3:22 p.m. ET

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Natalie Portman at the 1996 MTV Movie Awards; Ryan Gosling at the Los Angeles premiere of ‘Sugar’ on March 18, 2009; Ashton Kutcher backstage at MTV’s ‘Total Request Live’ on March 15, 2005 in New York City. Credit:

Kevin Mazur/WireImage; John Shearer/WireImage; Scott Gries/Getty

Plenty of actors have either gotten fired from or quit movies in the middle of production, but there’s something uniquely terrible about getting fired before you’ve actually had a chance to do the job you were hired for.

Pre-production is a long process that includes casting, hiring the crew, scheduling, rehearsals, and so much more — a lot can happen during the weeks and months leading up to filming. If you’re particularly unlucky or badly behaved, that can include getting fired.

When actors get fired from movie roles, the headlines tend to be even more eyebrow-raising because it’s not something that happens very often. Here are seven actors who were fired from movies before they even began filming.

Christian Bale

Christian Bale at the 12th Annual Genesis Awards in March 1998 in Beverly Hills, California.

Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Christian Bale is the only actor on this list who was hired, fired, and *rehired* before filming began. Bale was cast as Patrick Bateman in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*, with Mary Harron attached to direct. The distributor, Lionsgate, wanted Leonardo DiCaprio instead, so Harron was fired and replaced with Oliver Stone. That version of the film was short-lived, as both DiCaprio and Stone promptly exited.

Speaking with the *Wall Street Journal* in 2014, Bale explained that he never really accepted his firing. “I just pretended it didn’t happen,” he said. “I’m English, so I never go to a gym, but for that role it was part of the whole deal that I had to go. I still kept going down to the gym every day because I was going, ‘Oh, I’m making the film.’”

“I would call Mary Harron — she’d be having a nice dinner with her family — and I’d go, ‘So Mary, so when we do this scene,’” he continued. “And she’d go, ‘Christian, Oliver Stone is directing, DiCaprio is playing your role.’ I said, ‘Right, but you said it, my role, all right? It is coming back, so let’s talk about it, because it’s coming back to us.’ And she’d go, ‘Christian, can you please leave me alone?’”

In the end, Bale was right — both he and Harron were rehired, and they made one of the best thrillers in history.

Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling attends the premiere of ‘Sugar’ on March 18, 2009 in Los Angeles.

John Shearer/WireImage

Peter Jackson’s decision to direct the 2009 adaptation of Alice Sebold’s *The Lovely Bones* was pretty unexpected, but it’s hard to argue with the guy who made the* Lord of the Rings* trilogy.

Jackson initially cast Ryan Gosling as the father of Susie Salmon, the protagonist who’s murdered by a serial killer early in the story and narrates the fallout from heaven. After Gosling landed the role, he proceeded to gain 60 pounds, believing that the grieving dad of a murdered child wouldn’t exactly be preoccupied with maintaining his figure.

“We had a different idea of how the character should look,” Gosling told *The Hollywood Reporter* in 2010. “We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem. It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.”

Jackson replaced Gosling with Mark Wahlberg, an actor who is famously ripped and, as some critics would say, miscast in the film — which makes Jackson’s perspective on the situation kind of hilarious.

At Cannes in May 2026, Jackson finally offered his perspective on Gosling’s firing. “Anytime we recast an actor, it’s actually our fault because we didn’t get the casting right and we cast the wrong person for a role. It’s not because they did anything wrong,” the director told **. “So, I’m not going to talk about individuals, but you just got to realize that what you were imagining isn’t really quite happening, which means that we got it wrong and so we take full responsibility.”

In Gosling’s defense, it actually sounds like he had gotten it right, and that Jackson’s vision of the character was perhaps off the mark.

Kirsten Dunst and Winona Ryder

Kirsten Dunst at the ‘Wimbledon’ premiere on Sept. 13, 2004 in Los Angeles; Winona Ryder at the Marc Jacobs Comes to Los Angeles event at the Marc Jacobs Store in March 2005.

L. Cohen/WireImage; Jeffrey Mayer/WireImage

Actor and filmmaker Vincent Gallo is a polarizing figure, as evidenced by his appearance at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of *The Brown Bunny*.

In footage from the press conference published by the Associated Press, Gallo boasted about hiring and firing both Kirsten Dunst and Winona Ryder from the film before production began. Gallo said that he fired Dunst because of her “lunatic, nasty agent,” claiming that she “harassed” him.

The filmmaker said he hired Ryder, who had recently been arrested for shoplifting from Saks Fifth Avenue, for the publicity. “I knew she was going to jail, and this will be good for the movie,” said Gallo. “I would never cast Winona Ryder in a significant role.”

He said that Ryder, who previously worked with Gallo in the 1993 drama *House of the Spirits*, “claimed to trust” him, but that when she arrived on set, she “ball-busted” him about her wardrobe and makeup. “She, let’s say, had some tablets that seemed to have an impact on her behavior,” Gallo claimed. “It was a very bad moment.”

Neither Ryder nor Dunst seem to have responded to the filmmaker’s comments.

Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher backstage at MTV’s ‘Total Request Live’ on March 15, 2005 in New York City.

Scott Gries/Getty

*Elizabethtown* (2005) is one of Cameron Crowe’s least-beloved movies, partially due to Orlando Bloom’s shaky performance opposite an effortlessly charming Kirsten Dunst. Could the film have fared any better if Ashton Kutcher played the Bloom role? That’s a tough call. In any case, Kutcher revealed on his 2019 episode of *Hot Ones* that he was hired to replace Bloom, who was Crowe’s first pick, but wasn’t available because he was filming a Ridley Scott movie (likely 2005’s *Kingdom of Heaven*).

“So I went [to] audition, [Crowe] cast me and then we started working on it,” Kutcher explained. “I think he wanted to see the character rehearsals all the way, and I probably wasn’t disciplined enough as an actor to get myself to a point where I was able to do that and show it to him in a way that he felt comfortable.”

“At a certain point we just kind of agreed that it wasn’t working out. More him than me,” Kutcher continued. “But also, I found out at the same time that Orlando Bloom had just become available right when he was gonna let me go.”

Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore at the Chanel Metiers D’Art 2018/19 Show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Dec. 4, 2018 in New York City.

Roy Rochlin/WireImage

If you’re going to fire Julianne Moore, of all people, then you probably have a pretty good — and professional — reason to do so. That seems to have been the case with *Can You Ever Forgive Me?*, the 2018 drama about literary forger Lee Israel that ultimately earned Melissa McCarthy a Best Actress Oscar nomination. During an appearance on *Watch What Happens Live*, Moore clarified why she left the project in 2015.

“I didn’t *leave* that movie, I was *fired*. Nicole fired me!” Moore said, referring to screenwriter Nicole Holofcener, who was originally slated to direct the film before Marielle Heller took over. “I think she didn’t like what I was doing. We’d just been rehearsing and doing pre-production, and I think her idea of where the character was different than where my idea of the character was, so she fired me!”

Holofcener previously told *IndieWire* that Moore left the film six days before filming began, leading to delays that halted production. “I felt I had already made it,” the screenwriter said. “Every outfit, every location, every actor cast. It was a labor of love. It was traumatic. Terrible.”

McCarthy was cast when Heller came on board to direct the film, which went on to earn three Oscar nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Holofcener and co-writer Jeff Whitty, and Best Supporting Actor for Richard E. Grant.

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Timothy Olyphant

Timothy Olyphant at the ‘Shakespeare in Love’ premiere party on Dec. 3, 1998 in New York City.

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

In the early days of his career, Timothy Olyphant came *this close* to starring in a movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. As he explained to Jimmy Fallon during a 2013 appearance on *The Tonight Show*, Olyphant was briefly cast in the witchy 1998 rom-com *Practical Magic*, only to promptly lose the role in a manner befitting a screwball comedy.

“I got hired last minute. I took the job, I rehearsed for a couple days and I was just terrible,” Olyphant recalled. “As I was leaving for the airport I got a call from my agent and my business manager. He was talking to a colleague that morning and said his new client Tim Olyphant was doing a Sandra Bullock movie. The colleague said ‘Oh that’s great. My client, Aidan Quinn, he’s in that movie. What’s Tim playing?’”

Olyphant explained that the agents quickly realized that both of their clients had been cast as Gary, the cop that falls in love with Bullock’s character. “And they’re like, ‘Is it a movie about two sheriffs who fall in love with Sandra Bullock?’” Olyphant added, “By the way, that would have been a good movie.”

Maybe he’ll make a cameo appearance in *Practical Magic 2*?

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Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman at the 1996 MTV Movie Awards.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage

*Romeo + Juliet* (1995) is so perfectly cast, it’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in the title roles. As it happens, director Baz Luhrmann originally cast Natalie Portman as Juliet, telling EW that he searched “for months all over the world” and “saw hundreds of people” for the part.

Despite the fact that the character is 13 years old in William Shakespeare’s play, it was pretty wild of Luhrmann to cast a 13-year-old Portman opposite a then-21-year-old DiCaprio. After seeing rehearsals, the studio agreed.

In a 1996 interview with *The New York Times*, Portman recalled that studio executives at “Fox said it looked like Leonardo DiCaprio was molesting me when we kissed.”

Stuart Townsend

Stuart Townsend at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival.

J.Sciulli/WireImage

Aragorn became an instant career-defining role for Viggo Mortensen, so it’s surprising that he wasn’t the first choice for the* Lord of the Rings* trilogy. Director Peter Jackson initially cast Irish actor Stuart Townsend as the legendary Ranger of the North, only to replace him with Mortensen before filming began. Townsend reflected on the experience while speaking with EW in 2005, two years after the release of the final film in the trilogy, *The Return of the King*.

“Two weeks ago I finally read an article where the filmmakers said, ‘We were totally wrong about Stuart and we accept that it was our fault,’ which was so nice because I did get shafted up the a--,” Townsend said (it’s unclear what article he might be referencing). “I was there rehearsing and training for two months, then was fired the day before filming began. After that I was told they wouldn’t pay me because I was in breach of contract due to not having worked long enough. I had been having a rough time with them, so I was almost relieved to be leaving until they told me I wouldn’t be paid.”

“I have no good feelings for those people in charge, I really don’t,” he continued. “The director [Peter Jackson] wanted me and then apparently thought better of it because he really wanted someone 20 years older than me and completely different.”

Mortensen later opened up about the recasting in a 2021 interview with Yahoo Entertainment, in which he only had nice things to say about Townsend while confirming that Jackson wanted an older actor.

“I understood from the filmmakers that Stuart Townsend — who is a great actor, and was really perfect for the part — was too young, because he was the same age as the actors playing the Hobbits,” Mortensen explained. “They just needed someone who was a little bit older. It was just a bad luck situation.”

Mortensen added that he felt “unprepared,” given that his costars had been on location in New Zealand rehearsing “for weeks and months in some cases.”

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