In the movie Lost in Translation, Bill Murray plays a surly movie star filming a whiskey commercial. Frustrated with his performance, he tells the director, “This is not whiskey. This is iced tea. If you gave me real whiskey—” well, we can imagine what he’s getting at. In fact, a famous Hollywood saying about actors on set says, “If they’re drinking whiskey, its tea. If they’re drinking tea, it’s whiskey.”
Some actors choose to ignore the teetotalers and their methods, and just skip the middle man. Acting drunk is fine and good, but being drunk, well, that may just give them the performance they’ve been looking for.
Daniel Radcliffe in the ‘Harry Potter’ movies
Being the boy who lived isn’t the easiest gig, especially if you’re a young actor still trying to find your way in the world. By the time Daniel Radcliffe turned 18 and was filming his sixth Harry Potter movie, he found himself lost in the drink, telling British GQ, “I became so reliant on [alcohol] to enjoy stuff … There were a few years when I was just enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person’s lifestyle that really isn’t suited to me.”
Those problems led him down the rabbit hole. “Seriously,” he said, “in the last three years of drinking, I blacked out nearly every time. Blacking out was my thing.”
Still, he tried to keep some distance between his work and his whistle-wetting, but that divide proved increasingly more difficult to navigate. “I can honestly say I never drank at work on Harry Potter. I went into work still drunk, but I never drank at work. I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone. Dead behind the eyes.”
We’ll just have to leave it to eagle-eyed viewers to figure out what scenes Potter was blotto in, but thankfully, the boy behind the wizard has been sober for four years and counting now.
Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Passengers’
Filming a sex scene, even if it’s not ‘real,’ might be one of the most difficult challenges for any actor to tackle, especially if it’s their first time. That was certainly the case with Jennifer Lawrence, who told Hollywood Reporter that, to prepare for her sex scene with Chris Pratt in Passengers, she got “really, really drunk.” It wasn’t because nobody knew what they were doing — rather, according to her, everything went very well and there were no disasters. And it certainly wasn’t because filming a love scene with Chris Pratt is a bad fate. (It isn’t!) It was more nerves, both over the scene and the fact that Pratt was married.
That marriage part really weighed on Lawrence’s mind afterward. As she put it, “I was like, ‘What have I done? I don’t know.’ And he was married. And it was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach.” Her guilt was so severe she wound up calling her mom to verify it was OK to film a scripted sex scene with a married guy. That’s probably a conversation most mothers and daughters never have.
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in ‘Fight Club’
There were several improvised moments during the filming of Fight Club. When Edward Norton’s character, The Narrator, hits Tyler Durden for the first time, you can see Brad Pitt’s shock and pain as he screams, “You hit me in the ear.” That’s because director David Fincher had promised Pitt there would be no contact, before secretly telling Norton to swing away.
But another bit of spontaneity comes from the scene in which a drunk Durden and The Narrator smack golf balls from their house on Paper Street. The scene, in fact, isn’t even in the script. Norton and Pitt, who had bonded on set, had gotten drunk of their own volition and started smacking golf balls at the catering trucks. When Fincher saw them, he thought it fit their rebellious character, and decided to shoot it.
That’s why, on the DVD commentary, Pitt recalls fondly, “I do remember that we were semi-trashed here.”
It’s interesting to note that this scene, even though it was improvised, contains one of the first clues that Tyler Durden may not be who he appears. Even though both of the boys are hitting balls, the alarm doesn’t sound until Norton’s Narrator hits a car.
Martin Sheen in ‘Apocalypse Now’
Of all the tumultuous shoots in the history of Hollywood, none are quite as legendary as the set of Apocalypse Now. For much of the film, the cast and crew were simply adrift in the wilds of Manila, prey to the overgrown jungle and schizophrenic weather. Martin Sheen, the lead of the film, was a last-minute replacement, when director Francis Ford Coppola decided Harvey Keitel wasn’t working out. When Sheen arrived, weeks into the shoot, he found a set in chaos and dove right in. That’s how he found himself, on his 36th birthday, sloshed in a hotel room, trying to take direction when he couldn’t even stand upright.
“I was swacked—couldn’t hardly stand up. Francis tried to stop me when I hit the mirror—myself, the enemy—and I said, ‘No, stay away. I want this for me.’ I felt I wanted to wrestle this demon. It was planned, but unplanned. When the rushes came in, I said, ‘No, I never want to see that.’ And I never did, until it was released.”
How did Sheen get to a place where he was willing to chop his hand open, and smear gushing blood over his face? As a crew member from the film explained, “Francis kept Martin drunk for two days before that scene, kept him locked up. Francis kept telling him terrible things like how evil we all are, that we are all killers. It was devastating.” With friends like these, maybe it isn’t surprising that Sheen had a heart attack on set weeks later.
Shia LaBeouf in ‘Lawless’
As Shia LaBeouf said, while filming Lawless, he tackled his role of a moonshiner by, well, drinking tons of moonshine.
It was certainly effective — it apparently made him so drunk, he scared the bejeezus out of his co-star, Mia Wasikowska. According to LaBeouf, she was totally spooked by his drunken aggressiveness, even calling her lawyer to try to get out of filming the movie. LaBeouf claims he didn’t mean to be that way. It’s just that, as he put it, “when I showed up on set … my f**king eyes looked like puffed and my face … had that drunk bloat that I needed, that I couldn’t have if that wasn’t going on.”
In short, he wouldn’t have been able to effectively play the part had he downed a Bud Light and faked it. So now you know: even if you feel getting drunk on-camera is a good idea, stay away from the bad-news moonshine.
Billy Bob Thornton in ‘Bad Santa’
Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa character is the world’s worst, most drunken mall Santa. To properly play such a degenerate, Billy Bob apparently ditched the cookies and milk, focusing entirely on getting stone-drunk. “Even in a comedy, if you’re going to play a guy like this, you can’t be sort of drunk, you know? And I wasn’t sort of drunk. You have to go completely into it.”
So yeah, he really dedicated himself to his character’s take on Santa.
As far as the film’s children go, his Santa can barely tolerate them. Thornton, meanwhile, adores the little tykes, a feeling that can get in the way of playing one of the worst people ever. As he put it, “I love children, I’m crazy about them, but I had to ignore that fact and play the part.” Most likely, alcohol played a big role in forgetting he enjoys the kids his character curses out. Luckily, the kids didn’t seem to care. Thornton claims they were “so nonplussed, they couldn’t care less about cursing.” Good job, snowflakes.