29 Actors Who Demanded Big Changes To Their Characters And Scripts Bryce Dallas Howard wanted to keep her heels on in “Jurassic World” as “a metaphor.” When it comes to acting, the script isn’t gospel. Many actors made bold choices in their performances, but some take it a step further and suggest significant changes to the story itself. Here are 29 actors who demanded big changes to their characters and scripts to Samuel. 23. When Meryl Streep first read the novel Kramer vs. Kramer, which Avery Corman intentionally wrote to be anti-feminist, she thought Joanna came off as “an ogre, a princess, an ass.” She only agreed to accept the role in the film adaptation on the grounds that the script would be rewritten to make Joanna a more sympathetic, realistic, and fully developed character. She also wrote Joanna’s powerful courtroom speech herself. In Meryl’s version of events, she had actually been called in for a minor role, but writer/director Robert Benton, producer Stanley R. Jaffe, and lead actor Dustin Hoffman were so impressed by her understanding of Joanna that they decided she was the best fit for the role. Robert pulled her to the side and asked her to rewrite Joanna’s upcoming courtroom speech because his version felt like “a man trying to write a woman’s speech.” He told Vanity Fair, “Part of the pleasure she must have taken is showing to Dustin she didn’t need to be slapped. She could have delivered anything to anybody at any time.” 24. Jason Isaacs’s input is the reason his Harry Potter character, Lucius Malfoy, has long hair and a distinctly wizardy wardrobe. He told Entertainment Weekly, “I went to the set, and they had this idea of me wearing a pinstripe suit, short black-and-white hair. I was slightly horrified. He was a racist, a eugenicist. There’s no way he would cut his hair like a Muggle, or dress like a Muggle. In order to keep the hair straight, I had to tip my head back, so I was looking down my nose at everyone. There was 50 percent of the character. I asked for a walking stick, which [director] Chris Columbus first thought was because I had something wrong with my leg. I explained I wanted it as an affectation so I can pull my wand out [of the cane]. After a second’s thought, he said, ‘You know what, I think the toy guys are going to love you.’ He was completely right.” 25. While reading the script for The Usual Suspects, Benicio del Toro realized that his character Fred Fenster’s only purpose was to be the first to die, so he convinced director Bryan Singer to let him deliver his lines in a made-up accent. On Inside the Actor’s Studio, Benicio said, “Every line that [Fred] said didn’t really affect the plot. So I sat down with Bryan Singer, and I said, ‘It really doesn’t matter what this guy says. And if you allow me to, I think that we should allow me to do something with it.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead.'” 26. Initially, Michelle Rodriguez’s The Fast and the Furious character, Letty Ortiz, was supposed to cheat on Dominic Toretto, but the actor opposed the storyline. She told the Daily Beast, “It was more of a Point Break idea. They just followed the format without thinking about the reality of it. Is it realistic for a Latin girl who’s with the alpha-est of the alpha males to cheat on him with the cute boy? I had to put my foot down. I basically cried and said, ‘I’m going to quit’ and, ‘Don’t sue me, please I’m sorry, but I can’t do this in front of millions of people.’ My whole point in being an actress is that I thought I got to live a dream. And I don’t dream about being a slut! Do you?!” Costar Vin Diesel helped her advocate for the changes she wanted. She said, “Vin was the first one to pull me to the side while I was crying, and he just looked at me and said, ‘I got your back. Chill out and let me handle this, and you’re right it makes me look bad anyway.’ And there you go. That was the beginning of the Letty fairytale.” 27. When Jack Nicholson was first approached to play Frank Costello in The Departed, he declined. He told Variety, “I actually turned the movie down the first time it came to me because the character didn’t really exist. But Leo [DiCaprio] and Marty [Scorsese] talked me into it. I guess you can say I was attracted to the company. Marty is very free with his ideas and very receptive to yours. We built this character layer by layer, until we had something that fit inside a great genre film, but also pushed the envelope until the movie becomes almost operatic.” 28. Rutherford Falls actor Jesse Leigh told Pulse Spikes, “There were trans roles when I started out, but they were one-note and very stereotypical. But when I read for the role of Bobbie, the role was originally male-identifying and gay. I kind of wanted to make the role myself. So, therefore, I wore what I wear every day my bell-bottoms and I put on a cute wing liner and some blush. I totally just walked it. I went in [for] my audition one week and then got the screen tests the next week. Within a span of two weeks, I had found out that I got the role of Bobbie. It wasn’t until I actually booked the role that I sat down with the writers and they had asked me about growing up and being non-binary and stories about being non-binary from my childhood. I felt super lucky that the character was kind of sculpted around my life.” 29. And finally, when shooting Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando completely threw director Francis Ford Coppola’s vision for his character, Colonel Walter Kurtz, out the window. He went the method acting route, refused to memorize most of his lines, and improvised the majority of the time. The director worked around him by recording his improvised ramblings for five days, typing up the parts he wanted to keep, putting them on tape, and giving him headphones.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1/actors-demanded-script-changes
