“…and Kevin Costner as ‘The Corpse’: 14 cases of actors getting cut entirely from notable films

1. Kevin Costner, The Big Chill (1983)
Kevin Costner missed out on a huge break when his small but central role in 1983’s The Big Chill was cut, but he became one of the most famous cases of an actor getting removed from a prominent movie. Costner, still years away from being famous in his own right, was originally supposed to appear in several flashback scenes to show what his character was like before his suicide and funeral bring together a group of college friends and facilitate numerous Motown sing-alongs. But considering the ruthless editing that all but removed him from the movie, it’s fitting that only his slashed wrists are visible as a mortician attends to his corpse in the opening scene. Needless to say, Costner’s career recovered, and Big Chill writer-director Lawrence Kasdan gave his friend a consolation prize by casting him as one of the leads in the well-regarded 1985 Western Silverado.

2. La Toya Jackson, Brüno (2009)
Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t known for his sensitivity. But after Michael Jackson died, Cohen bowed to the dictates of good taste for perhaps the first and last time by cutting a scene from Brüno in which his in-your-face fashionista character Brüno invites La Toya Jackson to eat sushi off an obese naked man, and all but begs her to call her brother Michael and get him to join them. Or, failing that, pretend to be Michael Jackson: “I could get you the jacket and the glove, all you’d have to do is speak in a slightly higher voice,” Cohen insists to a visibly uncomfortable La Toya. Unlike pretty much everyone else on this list, La Toya was probably thrilled at being deleted from a film, though her scene did turn up on the DVD.

3. Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke, The Thin Red Line (1998)
For his first film since 1978’s Days Of Heaven, famed writer-director Terrence Malick brought together seemingly every male star in Hollywood, including Sean Penn, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly, John Travolta, Thomas Jane, and many, many more. But a cavalcade of big names fell victim to his unusual working methods and 20th Century Fox’s understandable reluctance to release a five-hour-plus movie. Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen, and Mickey Rourke were all eventually cut from Malick’s loose, largely improvised adaptation of James Jones’ anti-war novel. Malick began with a script that served only as a loose outline, then shot enough material for his five-hour cut. When The Thin Red Line was shortened considerably, plenty of heavyweight thespians ended up on the cutting-room floor. Malick has hinted that he might someday release a director’s cut restoring their roles and greatly expanding the roles of actors who did make it into the film, but given the pace at which he works, cultists shouldn’t hold their breath waiting.

4. James Van Der Beek, Storytelling (2001)
As it exists now, Todd Solondz’s 2001 feature Storytelling divides neatly into two halves: “Fiction,” in which a creative-writing professor has affairs with his students, and “Non-Fiction,” in which Paul Giamatti plays a documentarian making a film about a high-school student and his family. But was there supposed to be a third segment? That’s the rumor that’s circulated since the film’s release. What is known: James Van Der Beek shot scenes in which he played a gay football player, including an explicit sex scene, but he doesn’t appear in the movie at all. Solondz remains elusive about the cut, but as reported by The Playlist, he did recently tell a Boston audience, “I have dropped actors in every single movie, and not because I didn’t like their work, but a movie has to breathe, it has to have its proper life, so you have to, as they say, ‘kill your babies so the whole can live.’ So certainly [he wasn't dropped] because someone told me I had to get rid of him, or the sex scene was too explicit, nothing silly like that. No, it was an artistic decision.”

5. Ghostface Killah, Iron Man (2008)
Wu-Tang Clan rapper, eccentric, and all-around loose cannon Ghostface Killah adopted the persona of comic-book superhero Iron Man/dashing millionaire industrialist playboy Tony Stark (or “Tony Starks,” in Ghostface-ese) as one of his many hip-hop alter egos. Ghostface even named his debut solo album Ironman. So when Paramount finally got around to adapting Iron Man for the big screen, the filmmakers figured they’d acknowledge the rapper’s longtime association with the Marvel hero by giving him a tongue-in-cheek cameo. Alas, the scene where hip-hop’s Iron Man rubs shoulders with the cinematic incarnation in Dubai was cut for pacing reasons, and Ghostface only made it into the finished film via a video for his song “Celebration.”

6. David and Peter Paul, Natural Born Killers (1994)
According to Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, bodybuilding brothers David and Peter Paul—a.k.a. the Barbarian Brothers—desperately wanted to break into the motion-picture business, so they offered to finance a film by an up-and-coming young video-store-clerk-turned-screenwriter named Quentin Tarantino, on the condition that he write a scene that would let them flex their acting chops as well as their bulging biceps. Tarantino was so uncomfortable with the request that he had Avary script the Natural Born Killers scene in which sleazy tabloid journalist Robert Downey Jr. interviews the Paul brothers after they’ve had their legs hacked off by the film’s mass-murdering protagonists. In spite of the mutilation, David and Peter admire their attackers’ Arnold Schwarzenegger-like charisma at length. But the scene—which director Oliver Stone purportedly hailed as the best part of the screenplay—never made it into the final film. At least the Paul brothers were in good company: Ashley Judd’s nine-minute courtroom scene was cut from the final version as well.

7. Brandon Routh, The Informers (2008)
Like many of the films chronicled here, Gregor Jordan’s ill-fated adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1995 short-story collection The Informers changed shape radically throughout its production. Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay but didn’t have many positive things to say about the end product, envisioned the film as a Short Cuts-like epic intertwining numerous subplots about Southern Californians luxuriating in their own moral degradation. But by the time the film was released in 2008 to bad reviews and worse box-office, it ran a mere 98 minutes, and a subplot involving Superman Returns hunk Brandon Routh as a vampire was excised completely, leaving audiences and critics to ponder the moral emptiness and decadence of much-less-literal forms of bloodsucking, youth-obsessed parasites.