DO YOUR RESEARCH!
We at the BRI take pride in being researchers. Immersing yourself in a subject is essential if you want to accurately convey it to an audience. That counts with acting, too. Here are four odd stories about actors and how they prepared for their roles…to varying degrees of success.
WOLFERINE
When Hugh Jackman showed up on the set of X-Men in 1999, the 31-year-old Aussie was so excited to be playing Wolverine that he decided to show off how much he knew about wolves. He started slinking around with his head down, sniffing everything and everyone in a very menacing manner.
“What are you doing?” asked the director.
“Yeah, man, I’ve been studying wolves and I think we can bring that to the screen!”
“What? You’re not a wolf, man. You’re a wolverine!”
Jackman laughed. “Yeah, but obviously there’s no such thing as a wolverine.”
And then, in front of everyone, the actor got a quick biology lesson: wolverines are real animals (native to North America), and they are not “little wolves.” Even worse: Jackman didn’t need to study any mammal. The only things that Wolverine and a wolverine have in common are sharp claws and a reputation for being fierce. Otherwise, the adamantium-clawed, mutton-chopped mutant shares no traits with the largest member of the Mustelid family, which also includes weasels and ferrets. In Jackman’s defense, as he later explained on promotional press junkets, “I’d never read an X-men comic, I’d never seen an actual wolverine. We don’t have them in our zoos.” (But he did spend three weeks studying everything there is to know about wolves, so there’s that.)
ON A DIFFERENT PLANE
If you were going to play a fighter jet pilot in a movie, it might be a good idea to study up on piloting—unless it’s an animated movie and you’re a voice actor. Then you simply read the lines they wrote for you and act like you know what you’re talking about. That would be enough for most actors, but not Holly Hunter. When she was voicing Helen “Elastigirl” Parr in 2004’s The Incredibles, her character had to fly a fighter jet. Only this wasn’t in the script. (Spoilers ahead.) Originally, another character—Helen’s old friend, Snug—was going to fly the plane and then die when it crashes into the ocean. When Helen and the kids land safely in the water, she would see her old friend perish, creating a very sad moment, and propelling the plot forward. One problem: the animators were running behind, so they asked director Brad Bird if maybe Helen could fly the plane instead…and not die. They explained that it would take them too long to design and cast a major character who was only going to get a few minutes of screen time. Bird agreed, and all of a sudden, Snug was out and Helen was a fighter pilot.
George Washington owned dogs named Madame Moose, Drunkard, and Sweetlips.
Hunter, who played an air-traffic controller in Always (1989), and whose uncle was a commander in the U.S. Air Force, was determined to get it right. She read flight manuals and met with fighter pilots and learned what all the terms meant, even down to the correct inflections.
So next time you’re watching that scene in The Incredibles when Helen is desperately trying to outfly the cruise missiles, take a moment to marvel at how realistic she sounds when says into the radio, “Friendlies at two-zero miles south-southwest of your position. Angels 10. Track east. Disengage!” Then check out the next scene, where Helen would have watched her friend die. It had already been completed when they edited Snug out of the script—which is why in the final film, she seems really, really upset at the sight of an empty plane sinking into the sea.
Bonus Trivia: Brad Bird paid homage to his 1999 directorial debut Iron Giant by making Helen’s pilot call sign IG-99 (India Golf Niner-Niner).
WHAT’S A PENGWING?
How does a top-tier nature program get a top-tier actor to narrate and then botch something as simple as the pronunciation of penguin? The show was an episode of the BBC’s South Pacific, which aired in 2009, and the narrator was Benedict Cumberbatch. Everything about the documentary is normal until the renowned British actor gets to a line like, “A freshwater stream through the forest makes a handy highway for a parent pengwing on its way home.” What’s a pengwing? That was the number-one question from Cumberbatch’s fans when he appeared on the Graham Norton Show in 2014. An embarrassed Cumberbatch was quick to point out that he didn’t do the show alone: “There was a team of natural history experts funded by you, the tax-paying public.” But seriously, how did they botch it? Apparently, the filmmakers did ask Cumberbatch to say the word again several times, but he just couldn’t get it right, “so they just gave up,” he said. (No word of explanation for the goof from the BBC.) Good news, though: Cumberbatch knows how to say the word now (he had to learn it for his role in the animated movie…Penguins). And even though he can say it, he prefers not to. “Now I’m completely terrified of the word. I don’t go near it.”
Dragons in Mesoamerican legends have feathers.
Chalk this one up to odd luck. A major plot point of writer/director Adam McKay’s 2018 dark comedy Vice is the numerous heart attacks suffered by Vice President Dick Cheney. But McKay didn’t do a whole lot of research, basically just writing “Dick has a heart attack” wherever necessary in the script. While filming one of those heart attack scenes, Christian Bale, who was portraying Cheney, asked McKay how he wanted him to play it. “What do you mean?” asked McKay. “It’s a heart attack. Your arm hurts, right?”
Bale, who had done his research, told McKay, “No, no—one of the more common ways is that you get really queasy and your stomach hurts.” So that’s how they did the scene.
Ironically, while making Vice, McKay had his own vices, overeating and smoking too much. So, several pounds overweight, he hit the home gym hard after filming wrapped. On his third workout, “I get tingly hands and my stomach starts going queasy,” he told Deadline Hollywood. At first, he dismissed it, but then he remembered that scene with Bale. “I ran upstairs and downed a bunch of baby aspirin, and I called my wife who immediately called 911. Got to the hospital really fast, and the doctor said, ‘Because you did that, no damage was done, your heart is still really strong.’ That’s because I remembered Christian Bale telling me that.”
A RANDOM BIT OF FACTINESS
Sour-sensing taste buds also detect the fizz in soda.