Most of us are used to the idea of an actor getting a role and, you know, acting the part. We'll accept a stunt double for scenes where the actor needs to jump out of a plane. But for the most part, if we're watching Adam Sandler we want to see Adam Sandler. (Wait, why do we want to see Adam Sandler again?) Anyway, as it turns out, we're not always watching who we think we're watching, and that happens much more often than we realize. There have been plenty of times when actors were swapped out, and those of us in the audience never even noticed.
Lena Headey - Game of Thrones
Lena Headey plays Cersei Lannister, the ultimate villain on HBO's Game of Thrones. So viewers watched with a bit of sadistic glee when the character was literally and figuratively dressed down to be paraded through the streets of King's Landing in nothing but a short haircut and smears of filth.
The scene is intense and humiliating and drawn out so the audience can experience her awkward humiliation. The craziest part, however, is that we're not even watching Headey in the scene. The entire walk is performed by a body double seamlessly merged with Headey's facial expressions and body language to make one awkward, horrible walk to the Red Keep.
Jennifer Aniston - Friends
Friends was a massive success and Jennifer Aniston is arguably the biggest star it produced. Which makes it all the more unusual that it took years after the show was off the air for someone to finally notice one episode in particular in which Aniston inexplicably disappears.
In a random episode from the ninth season, a fan watching a Friends marathon happened to notice that in one scene when Aniston is standing next to Matt Leblanc, it's not Aniston at all. Seems that Aniston's stand-in was on set that day and, for whatever reason, her scene wasn't cut or edited in such a way as to remove her from the shot. The presence of a stand-in isn't such a crazy thing; after all, stand-ins are on set to replace actors when they're not available. It's just that they usually don't end up in the final cut.
Paul Walker - Furious 7
Furious 7 was maybe halfway through filming when series star Paul Walker tragically died in an automobile accident. The production shut down temporarily so that producers could consult with Walker's family on what they'd like to do. As the star of the film, there was no way to move forward without him, and there simply wasn't enough filmed already to try to cobble a movie together.
Walker's family agreed that the movie should be finished and his two brothers volunteered as stand-ins, since both closely resembled the actor physically. With the help of the special effects crew at WETA who brought Gollum to life in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in Planet of the Apes, special effects turned Cody and Caleb Walker into Paul Walker for the remainder of the film. Furious 7 went on to be the biggest hit of the franchise and one of the biggest films of all time, grossing over $1.5 billion.
Harrison Ford - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
On the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Harrison Ford suffered a pretty severe back injury that sidelined him for several weeks of filming. Steven Spielberg, however, was prepared for any eventuality and simply swapped Ford for his longtime stunt double Vic Armstrong, who looked and moved so much like Ford that he managed to confuse Spielberg on-set more than once. A number of action scenes were filmed without Ford, including the epic fight between Indy and the massive Thugee cult member on the conveyor belt in the mine
Crispin Glover - Back to the Future Part 2
This may be the ultimate actor switcheroo. So egregious was this swap that it resulted in not just a lawsuit against the producers, but new regulations from the Screen Actors Guild to prevent it from ever happening again.
So what happened?
Crispin Glover refused to reprise his role as George McFly in the sequels to Back to the Future due to a dispute over his salary or ethical concerns about the moral of the movie, depending on which story you believe. Unable to come to an agreement with Glover, producers recast the role with Jeffrey Weissman. So far so good, right? They then covered Weissman in make-up and prosthetics that had been cast from Glover's face in the first movie when they aged him for the scenes when he's older. Weissman became a Crispin Glover doppelganger, basically trading on the actor's appearance without actually using him. After Glover's lawsuit, which he won, the Screen Actor's Guild made it a rule that no actor's likeness could be stolen in such a way again.
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