Cuckoo Bananas

There are all sorts of stories out there of actors doing crazy things on set, but in my opinion this story about Wesley Snipes on the set of Blade 3 (from Cracked.com) tops them all. Enjoy.



Method acting can be a useful tool when you're playing, say, a man who has lost everything and just wants his family back. It's not so useful when you're playing a vampire/human hybrid who hunts other vampires and decapitates people with swords -- especially if your idea of a vampire hunter is actually "someone who smokes weed all day." If it wasn't obvious already, we're talking about Wesley Snipes in the Blade movies, most of which he apparently spent alternately pretending he was a real vampire and getting baked.

Cracked favorite Patton Oswalt recently addressed rumors that Snipes not only had stayed in character all the time during shooting of Blade 3: Trinity, but had also been stoned as hell. Snipes apparently spent all day smoking weed in his trailer and refusing to come out. As a result, they had to rely on stand-ins to shoot most of his scenes, and then simply used close-ups of Snipes for the reaction shots. And by reaction shots, we mean Snipes' emotionless face grunting or saying "Mmm" to everything, which was due to a combination of not knowing what he was reacting to and having the mental agility of a Phish concertgoer.

So, in the movie, many of Ryan Reynolds' funniest lines to Blade were included simply because Snipes wasn't there when he said them -- Reynolds was able to just improvise the most ridiculous stuff, knowing that the movie would always cut to a shot of a stoic Blade saying, "Mmm."

When Snipes did bother to leave his trailer, he spent his time making friends on the set: One time he sat down with director David Goyer and told him he sucked at his job and should quit. When Goyer replied that maybe Snipes should be the one to quit since they could always shoot the rest of the film with the stand-ins, Snipes snapped and tried to strangle the director.

After the assassination attempt failed, Goyer paid a bunch of bikers he had met at a strip club to pose as his security team and drop by the set one day to scare Snipes. The prank worked, as Snipes never got near Goyer again, instead communicating with him via Post-it notes ... which he signed, "From Blade."