Actors: Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas
Film: “The Thin Red Line”
How Badly Were Their Roles Affected: Excised Completely
Bitterness Level: 0/10 lemons
What Happened & How They Reacted: Along with Rourke, only Bill Pullman and Lukas Haas definitely had filmed roles cut from the movie — photos of both of them on set exist. However it doesn’t seem like their parts were ever huge, and as supporting players in a cast so stacked with A-listers, perhaps they weren’t wholly surprised not to make the final cut. Either way, neither has gone on record in any major way about their disgruntlement, a sign of either class or resignation.
Actor: Billy Bob Thornton
Film: “The Thin Red Line”
How Badly Was His Role Affected: His voiceover narration track went unused
Bitterness Level: 0/10 auditory lemons
What Happened & How He Reacted: Billy Bob Thornton hasn’t made a big deal out of his involvement, or lack thereof, in the finished film. However it is known that he recorded a 3-hour-long narration for the entire film under Malick’s supervision. Of course the final film has the poetic, overlapping narration spoken by many actors, sometimes unidentifiably, and so it becomes a much more choral piece than a single voice could have achieved, adding to Malick’s throughline about the universality of human experience. Whatever happened, nothing of Thornton’s voice remains, and this is one case where we’d hazard that the reason was simply an artistic choice, and the decision was probably the right one.
Actors: Gary Oldman, Viggo Mortensen, Martin Sheen, Jason Patric
Film: “The Thin Red Line”
How Badly Were Their Roles Affected: Never got to the shooting stage
Bitterness Level: 0/10 imaginary lemons
What Happened & How They Reacted: Gary Oldman never filmed a scene for Malick — he never even got on a plane to Australia. According to this EW article, a role was written specifically for him, and sent to him. But before photography began, Malick realized he already had too many characters and the shoot was becoming unwieldy (and how right he was — read all about it here), and Oldman’s role was removed at script stage. Similarly, Viggo Mortensen, Martin Sheen and Jason Patric were all mooted at some point, with Patric apparently largely a studio suggestion. The former two definitely participated in readthroughs, and received thank you credits for their pains, but there’s nothing to suggest that their involvement or commitment went much further than that, and certainly they themselves aren’t anywhere, that we could find, on record as complaining. And in Sheen’s case at least, the experience seems not to have tarnished his admiration and gratitude toward Malick for providing him with his breakout role in “Badlands” — in a 2004 interview he called Malick “a deeply spiritual, bright, articulate man who had a profound influence on me…”
Actor: Christopher Plummer
Film: “The New World”
How Badly Was His Role Affected: Reduced
Bitterness Level: 7/10 lemons
What Happened & How He Reacted: Christopher Plummer waited a good few years before letting rip, in amusing and quite public fashion, on Malick. Believing his role as Captain Newport to have been decimated by Malick’s editing process, he said to New York Magazine in 2011: “[Malick is] fascinated by nature, and just cuts to birds.” He also claims he wasn’t alone in being disgruntled on that set: “Colin Farrell kept saying, ‘My character, he’s a fuckin’ osprey. That’s how he sees me.’ You’d be playing a passionate scene, and he’d say in that strange southern voice of his, mixed with Harvard and Oxford, ‘Ah, jes’ stop a minute, Chris. I think there’s an osprey flying over there. Do you mind if I just take a few shots?’ I wrote him an infuriated letter because I saw the film and I was hardly in it—he cut my part to shit.”
Plummer even compared himself with Adrien Brody, then-poster boy for the Let Down By Malick brigade: “…it recalled the story of Adrien Brody, the lead in ‘The Thin Red Line.’ He went to the premiere, and he wasn’t in it!… I was awful to [Malick], but I did say I admired him. He’s an individual—also mad as a hatter.” As much as he seem to soften a touch at the end, in 2012 at a Newsweek awards season roundtable, Plummer went even further, ranting (much to ‘Thin Red Line’ actor George Clooney‘s amusement, it seems): “I love some of his movies very much, but the problem with Terry is he needs a writer, desperately. He insists on overwriting until it sounds terribly pretentious… and he edits his films in such a way that he cuts everyone out of them… I was put in all sorts of different spots and suddenly my character was not in the scene that I thought I was in, in the editing room. It was very strange. It completely unbalances everything. And a very emotional scene that I had suddenly became background noise.” Again he brings up the letter. “I gave him shit. I’ll never work with him again.” You can read more about the shooting of “The New World” in our comprehensive breakdown of the movie.
