Requiring the crew to strip, communicating via Post-It notes, and a bizarre rule about running. From Oscar winners to action stars, these actors have some seriously strict rules on set.
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00:00Who says acting is easy?
00:02For these performers, playing pretend is deadly serious, and if you don't go along with them,
00:06you might end up choked out on set by Wesley Snipes.
00:09Tom Cruise has never raced in the Olympics, but he might be the most famous runner of
00:13all time.
00:14He's also made a name for himself, hanging outside of planes, jumping off of buildings,
00:18hanging off of buildings, jumping out of planes.
00:20But the running's the most famous thing.
00:22Don't run.
00:23You don't have to chase me.
00:26You don't have to run."
00:28According to a news report by The Herald, Tom Cruise even keeps some special underwear
00:32on set for when he films a running scene, specifically thongs, for comfort and flexibility.
00:37The man takes running so seriously that he's said to have a surprising role on set.
00:41When he's running in a movie, no one is allowed to run alongside him.
00:44I've just been an athlete my whole life, gymnastics, and I've loved to sprint since I came out
00:49running.
00:50Reporting on the rumor, The Guardian took it all with a grain of salt.
00:52In their assessment, if it was true, it's just because Cruise is so fast and doesn't
00:56want to slow down for anyone.
00:58But a former co-star has given the rumor a lot of credibility.
01:01Annabelle Wallace, who co-starred with Cruise in 2017's The Mummy, claims that Cruise initially
01:06wouldn't do any running scenes with her.
01:07He only made an exception after she proved she could keep up.
01:11Viewers have pointed out scenes from other movies where Cruise is running next to people,
01:14like 2016's Jack Reacher, Never Go Back, but for most of his films, he seems to hold fast
01:19to this rule.
01:20Daniel Day-Lewis
01:21Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the most famous and admired actors of all time, but for a
01:24few months at least, he thought he was Abraham Lincoln.
01:26There's never been a human being that I never met that I loved as much as him, ever.
01:32I doubt there ever will be.
01:34A method actor who's selective about the roles he plays, Day-Lewis goes to great lengths
01:38to fully inhabit his characters.
01:39On the set of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the commitment was utterly spellbinding.
01:44Consider this.
01:45If you were to meet President Lincoln, you wouldn't call him Daniel.
01:47So to help his lead actor out, Spielberg referred to not just Day-Lewis, but the entire cast
01:52by the names of characters they played.
01:54He also asked Jared Harris, the actor who played President Grant, to stop speaking in
01:58his natural British accent on set, for the sake of keeping Day-Lewis — sorry, Lincoln
02:02— in the zone.
02:03It's a feat rarely achieved in the history of method acting.
02:06Not only did Day-Lewis stain character the whole production, he apparently managed to
02:10make everyone else do the same thing.
02:12Lindsay Lohan
02:13Lindsay Lohan's had a bit of a resurgence lately, but in 2013, it's fair to say she
02:16was a little bit flaky.
02:17In her defense, 2013's The Canyons was kind of a flaky movie, an erotic thriller about
02:22the dark side of Los Angeles.
02:23The Canyons made headlines for using real, adult film actors in major roles.
02:28Lindsay, a more traditional actress, was reportedly at times uncomfortable with some aspects of
02:32the production, specifically the nudity and sex scenes.
02:35Shooting one such scene, Lohan initially refused to go topless for the camera.
02:39But you know that old kernel of advice, if you've got stage fright, just imagine everyone
02:43in their underwear.
02:44According to the LA Times, that light bulb went off for Lindsay when she asked all ten
02:48members of the movie's crew to strip down with her.
02:50Which they did.
02:52Jim and Andy, The Great Beyond chronicles Jim Carrey's work behind the scenes of the
02:55Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon.
02:58If you don't know already, Andy Kaufman was a comedian and performer who had a knack for
03:01making you question reality.
03:03It was hard to tell when he was serious or not.
03:05He also had an alter ego, Tony Clifton, a crass and abrasive lounge singer.
03:10Carrey played both of these characters in Man on the Moon, and a documentary about the
03:13movie shows the lengths he went to demand his collaborators buy into the fiction.
03:17Tony, I want to introduce the head of the studio, Ron Meyer.
03:20Nice to meet you.
03:21Nice to meet you, thanks for the gift.
03:24Even at its most polite, method acting is kind of abrasive.
03:27But Carrey appears to have been anything but polite.
03:29Jim and Andy shows multiple scenes of Carrey's director, producers, and co-workers clearly
03:34being frustrated as he refuses to break character.
03:37Carrey even went so far as to basically bully his co-workers, including Jerry Lawler, who
03:41clearly wanted to beat Carrey to the moon and back by the time their scenes were over.
03:46Wesley Snipes has a reputation as an intense performer, like strangle-the-director-intense,
03:50allegedly.
03:51In 2012, Patton Oswalt spoke to the A.V. Club about working with Snipes on Blade Trinity.
03:56According to him, the actor got physical with director David Goyer, but in a 2020 interview
04:00with The Guardian, Snipes said the story was false.
04:03But Snipes didn't deny another claim about his work ethic.
04:06Oswalt said that Snipes only showed up on set for his own close-up shots and made the
04:09casting crew work with his stand-in for everything else.
04:12He also didn't deny Oswalt's claims that he only communicated via post-it notes, which
04:16were signed from Blade.
04:17You're not ready to roll with this.
04:19Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to move forward.
04:22That's exactly what happened with the cast of Back to the Future.
04:25The first choice to play Marty McFly in the iconic 1985 film was Michael J. Fox, but at
04:30the time, the actor was unavailable.
04:32So Eric Stoltz was cast instead.
04:34He shot the movie for a whopping five weeks before director Robert Zemeckis recast Fox,
04:39which meant reshooting everything all over again.
04:42According to the 2015 book We Don't Need Roads, the making of the Back to the Future trilogy,
04:46Stoltz was fired because he went overboard with his method acting, which annoyed the
04:50film's crew.
04:51The book even quotes the film's co-writer, Bob Gale, who noted how Stoltz took his method
04:55acting to such extremes that he even asked the crew to call him Marty on set.
04:59Yet the book revealed how Stoltz left bruises on Thomas F. Wilson, who played Biff, by getting
05:04overly aggressive in the film's cafeteria scene.
05:06Ultimately, the role of Marty McFly in a wacky time travel movie didn't require much method
05:11acting, let alone taking it so far to leave bruises on another actor.
05:14So Stoltz was recast, and film history was made.