9) Prometheus
Ever wondered why Ridley Scott hired Guy Pearce, a man in his 40s, to play Prometheus’s eccentric 99-year-old billionaire Peter Weyland? Watching the final film, it hardly makes sense that Scott would want an actor to play a character twice his age, thus forcing him into five hours of make-up each day to look convincingly old, when an actual old person would have sufficed.
Well, turns out Pearce got the role because he was also originally supposed to star in the film – sans prosthetics – as a young version of the character.
One flashback scene involving the younger Sir Peter was set on a terraformed Mars, home to one of Weyland’s off-world offices.
Other scenes, meanwhile, were set in the movie’s present, and found android David interacting with the hyper-sleeping Weyland in his dreams, in which Weyland resided in his idealized younger state, living on a yacht surrounded by beautiful women. Alas, these moments were cut.
Could they have saved Prometheus from being a Lindelof-tainted mess? Probably not, but they would have been cool to see nonetheless.