14 Actors Who Took One Look At The Script And Said, "No, Hand Me The Pen"

On a film set, an actor's job is typically pretty separate from a writer's. One creates the character, and the other brings it to life. Sometimes, however, the lines blur, and actors end up giving a TON of suggestions that get incorporated into the script, or they even rewrite parts of the script themselves.

Here are 14 actors who rewrote the script for their TV shows and movies:

1.While filming Wednesday Season 1, Jenna Ortega changed or decided not to say lines that she felt didn't fit with the character's personality.

At a Netflix Q&A, she said, "I remember there's a line where I’m talking about a dress, and initially, she was supposed to say, 'Oh my god, I'm freaking out over a dress, I literally hate myself.' And I was blown away because that sounded like… It was just a bunch of little things like that, where I felt like we were able to avoid a lot of dialogue in an attempt to make her sound human."

For Season 2, she's been promoted to producer. Appearing on the Hollywood Reporter's Comedy Actress Roundtable, she said, "I feel really lucky to be able to be in the [writers'] room early next season and be talking about scripts and giving notes."

2.After reading the original Cruel Intentions script, Reese Witherspoon found her character, Annette Hargrove, to be "too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy's manipulations." So, she spent a week rewriting Annette's dialogue with writer/director Roger Kumble.

Roger told Entertainment Weekly, "Annette was the character most removed from me. There's no way the movie would have its success if it weren't for [Reese's] talent as a writer."

Reese also said, "I was starting what I guess became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film."

3.Jeff Bridges said that he, lead actor Robert Downey Jr., and director Jon Favreau "basically rewrote the script" of Iron Man during their two weeks of rehearsal.

Appearing on the Hollywood Reporter's Actor's Roundtable, he said, "And the day before we were going to shoot, we get a call from the Marvel guy saying, 'Oh no, no, no. None of this is right.' So we would muster in my trailer and rehearse while the guys were in the studio tapping their foot, saying, 'When are they going to come?' We were still trying to figure out the [scenes] we were going to shoot."

4.While working on Iron Man 3, Robert Downey Jr. — who's well-known for improvising — would often cut scenes short to get his dialogue rewritten.

Director Shane Black told CinemaBlend, "Downey would be like, 'Time!' and I'd be like, 'We're shooting!' and he'd be, 'No, shut the cameras,' and we'd go back to the trailer, and we'd all write, because he wanted new lines."

5.After Edgar Wright, the original director and co-writer, left Ant-Man, Paul Rudd teamed up with Adam McKay to rewrite the script.

Adam told Collider, "I've always known Paul Rudd's a really good writer from improvising with him on set, but I had no idea he was that good — he's really great with dialogue. So the two of us holed up in hotel rooms on the east and west coast, and I think it was, like, six to eight weeks, we just ground it out and did a giant rewrite of the script. I was really proud of what we did. I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright and sort of just enhanced some stuff."

Costar Michael Douglas was initially skeptical of the decision to let Paul work on the script. He told Collider, "We had a couple of issues with directors. They were going through a few drafts. Paul was brought in, that was certainly not initially part of the whole thing, for him to write. I did raise my hand a little bit, because I didn't know Paul that well. I said, excuse me, but the leading actor writing the script, uhhhh, you know, no, no we're watching, alright fine. So, no, you know, I kind of assumed that there were the parameters from the comics, and I mean, you have to get used to playing somebody your own age, you know."

6.When Meryl Streep first read the novel Kramer vs. Kramer, which Avery Corman intentionally wrote to be anti-feminist, she thought Joanna came off as "an ogre, a princess, an ass." She only agreed to accept the role in the film adaptation on the grounds that the script would be rewritten to make Joanna a more sympathetic, realistic, and fully developed character. She also wrote Joanna's powerful courtroom speech herself.

In Meryl's version of events, she had actually been called in for a minor role, but writer/director Robert Benton, producer Stanley R. Jaffe, and lead actor Dustin Hoffman were so impressed by her understanding of Joanna that they decided she was the best fit for the role.

However, in the men's version of events,  she was only considered for Joanna, but "it was, for all intents and purposes, the worst meeting anybody ever had with anybody" because "she said a few things, not much, and she just listened." But they allegedly decided she was right for Joanna because the recent death of her partner, John Cazale, meant she had fresh pain and emotional turmoil she could draw from.

On set, Dustin reportedly mistreated Meryl, slapping her to get her to elicit the emotions he wanted or taunting her about John to get her to use "emotional recall."

After that incident, Robert pulled Meryl to the side and asked her to rewrite Joanna's upcoming courtroom speech because his version felt like "a man trying to write a woman's speech."

Robert told Vanity Fair, "Part of the pleasure she must have taken is showing to Dustin she didn't need to be slapped. She could have delivered anything to anybody at any time."

7.When Alan Rickman read the original Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, he thought it was so terrible that he decided to go behind the screenwriters' backs and get his friends, Ruby Wax and Peter Barnes, to help him write new lines.

Alan told the Times that he met up with Peter in a Pizza Express. He said, "I said, 'Will you have a look at this script because it's terrible, and I need some good lines.' So he did, and, you know, with kind of pizza and bacon and egg going all over the script."

After getting additional suggestions from Ruby, Alan worked with director Kevin Reynolds to implement the new lines on set.

Alan said, "Nobody knew this was happening except him. And I knew it had worked because, as I cleared the camera, I saw about 80 members of the crew just [stifling laughter].”

8.When Crispin Glover was offered the role of the Thin Man in Charlie's Angels, he refused to do the "terrible" and "expositional" dialogue, but he offered a suggestion for rewrites — the character should have no dialogue and be completely silent.

He told the Guardian, "Subsequent to River’s Edge, I was trying to find things that interested me. But, for the most part, the films did not reflect what my psychological interests were, and a certain persona was etched out that is essentially still with me, which is OK. But I recognized in 2000 and 2001 [during Charlie's Angels] that I really needed to make as much money as I could in order to fund my own filmmaking. So I switched my psychological perspective on how I choose movies, and I now see acting as my craft, but my films are my art."

9.When director Bassam Tariq left the upcoming Blade movie, lead Mahershala Ali was reportedly frustrated with the script. Marvel Studios brought on a new writer, but Mahershala reportedly requested further rewrites, which he's involved in.

He's very invested in the project, and he's actually the one who called Kevin Feige to suggest himself for the role.

10.When The Mummy (2017) was in production, Tom Cruise reportedly exercised nearly total creative oversight, with things like script approval promised in his contract. Unsatisfied with the original screenplay, he reportedly brought in two additional writers who helped rewrite it into the story he wanted to tell.

The changes his new writers reportedly made included giving his character more screen time than the Mummy and adding a twist where he got possessed for the drama.

He also brought in his own editor, his longtime collaborator Andrew Mondshein.

Supervising art director Frank Walsh told Variety, "This is very much a film of two halves: before Tom and after Tom. I have heard the stories about how he drives everything and pushes and pushes, but it was amazing to work with him. The guy is a great filmmaker and knows his craft. He will walk on to a set and tell the director what to do, say 'that's not the right lens,' ask about the sets, and as long as you don't fluff what you're saying to him…he's easy to work for."

11.When shooting Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando completely threw director Francis Ford Coppola's vision for his character, Colonel Walter Kurtz, out the window. He went the method acting route, refused to memorize most of his lines, and improvised the majority of the time.

The director worked around him by recording his improvised ramblings for five days, typing up the parts he wanted to keep, putting them on tape, and giving him headphones.

12.When Jack Nicholson was first approached to play Frank Costello in The Departed, he turned it down because the character wasn't even in the script yet. However, after director Martin Scorsese and lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio talked him into doing the movie, the trio worked together to create Frank.

Jack told Variety, "Marty is very free with his ideas and very receptive to yours. We built this character layer by layer, until we had something that fit inside a great genre film, but also pushed the envelope until the movie becomes almost operatic."

13.Edward Norton reportedly only agreed to star in The Incredible Hulk on the basis that he'd be allowed to rewrite Zak Penn's screenplay, but most of the scenes he penned were left on the cutting room floor.

Zak — who received sole writing credit for the script — told Entertainment Weekly, "Yes, [the fallout between Edward and me] prevented me from collaborating with him [during production]. I don’t really know the guy, he has his own process, and he chose to do it the way he wanted to do it... I wasn't happy with him coming to Comic-Con saying that he wrote the script. I can't tell you that made me go back and watch Fight Club."

14.And finally, Sylvester Stallone was initially cast as the lead in Beverly Hills Cop, but, since he was known as an action star, he rewrote the script into an action flick. Because his version raised the budget higher than Paramount was willing to go, he agreed to leave the project, remove anything screenwriter Daniel Petrie Jr. had penned from his script, and go make his own movie.

Daniel told Money Into Light, "By that time, the movie was so different that he was able to do that, and he was extremely gracious about it and took that suggestion. He used almost all of his material and incorporated it into his film Cobra. Actually, Stallone had renamed our lead character Axel Cobretti in his Beverly Hills Cop script."

Sylvester was replaced by Eddie Murphy.