20 stars who were cut from movies, including Simone Ashley in ‘F1’

Ana de Armas, Yesterday

Before her Academy Award nomination in 2022 for Blonde, Ana de Armas was excised from Danny Boyle’s speculative comedy Yesterday, the story of a songwriter who one day wakes up in a world where he’s the only person who remembers the Beatles.

In the film, he finds fame by passing their music catalog off as his own, which impacts his relationship with a girlfriend played by Lily James. de Armas was meant to emerge as a new love interest for the protagonist, but screenwriter Richard Curtis told CinemaBlend that test audiences “did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed.” That didn’t stop Universal Pictures from highlighting de Armas in a trailer for the film, which, believe it or not, led to a now-settled lawsuit about misleading movie trailers. —Randall Colburn

Simone Ashley, F1

Simone Ashley, who found fame on Netflix’s Bridgerton, was set to star alongside Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, and Kerry Condon in F1, a high-octane racing flick from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.

It’s unclear what role Ashley was meant to play, and watching the film won’t provide any answers, as she reportedly has no lines and only appears onscreen briefly in the final cut.

“It happens on every film, where you have to shoot more than you can use,” Kosinski told PEOPLE ahead of F1‘s June 2025 release. “There were two or three storylines that ultimately didn’t make into the final cut.” A bummer for Ashley, who told Who What Wear in March 2025 that she’d been attached to the film for “years.” —R.C.

Angela Bassett, Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Angela Bassett signed on to play the boss to Brad Pitt’s character of John Smith. She had scenes in which she manages the assassin, who is facing off against his wife Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie). While there was little explanation, Bassett was nowhere to be seen when Mr. & Mrs. Smith arrived in theaters in 2005. —Madeline Boardman

Josh Brolin, Suburbicon

Though it had been widely reported that Josh Brolin had a role in Suburbicon, director George Clooney ultimately had to leave the actor’s role out of the final cut.

“We shot a couple of scenes with Josh [playing] a baseball coach that are really, really funny,” Clooney explained to EW. “But after we did our first screening, the one thing that became really clear to me was that [the scenes] let the air out of the balloon, in terms of the tension in the film. I had to write him this awful note where I just said, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but these scenes really don’t work any more.’”

He continued, “He felt bad, and he thought maybe something went wrong, and I said, ‘I’m sending you the scenes, so you can see, they’re actually the two funniest scenes in the movie.’” Clooney added, “He was so great in the film. I never like talking about those kind of things because it can be really unfair to an actor, except to say he was just absolutely great in the movie.” —M.B.

Sterling K. Brown, Split

Sterling K. Brown has seen major success on the small-screen in recent years thanks to his turns as Randall Pearson on This Is Us and as Christopher Darden on The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

A potentially important big-screen gig wasn’t quite as fruitful, though. The Emmy-winning actor starred alongside James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Betty Buckley in M. Night Shyamalan’s horror film Split, but his scenes never saw the light of day. Deleted scenes revealed that Brown played Dr. Fletcher’s neighbor Professor Shaw in the film. —M.B.

May Calamawy, Gladiator II

When the trades began reporting on the cast of Gladiator II, the 2024 sequel to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning 2000 epic, Deadline wrote that May Calamawy had been cast as someone with “importance… to the story.” It was a curious thing, then, when the Moon Knight actress appeared only in a non-speaking background role. —R.C.

Chris Cooper, The Ring

The Ring may have been even more terrifying with the inclusion of Chris Cooper. The Oscar winner filmed footage for the horror flick as a serial rapist and murderer but his opening and closing scenes were nixed before the film’s release. —M.B.

Kevin Costner, The Big Chill

Early in his career, Kevin Costner nabbed a part in the star-studded dramedy The Big Chill. He played a character who died by suicide and filmed various flashback scenes for the film. When it hit theaters, however, Costner was noticeably missing from The Big Chill, featured only as a corpse with just seconds of screen time. —M.B.

Harrison Ford, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

The same year that he starred in Blade Runner, Harrison Ford was also expected to earn another film credit in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Ford booked a cameo gig as the principal at the school Elliott (Henry Thomas) attends, but his scenes were deleted from the final version of the smash hit. —M.B.

James Gandolfini, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The late James Gandolfini initially had a role in the Oscar-nominated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He was booked to play a man that Linda Schell (Sandra Bullock) meets in a support group for those who lost loved ones in 9/11, but his character was cut out due to poor reception from test audiences. —M.B.

Andy Garcia, Dangerous Minds

Andy Garcia filmed scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer for the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced drama Dangerous Minds. He was set to play the love interest to Pfeiffer’s character of former U.S. Marine LouAnne Johnson, but didn’t make it into the theatrical version of the movie as it was decided that Garcia’s character was, in his words, “unnecessary.” —M.B.

Sienna Miller, Black Mass

Sienna Miller was expected to appear in Black Mass as Catherine Greig, a girlfriend of Johnny Depp’s male lead, Whitey Bulger. The British actress is not included in the final cut of the thriller, however. Director Scott Cooper told The Boston Globe that Miller was axed from the story about the infamous murderer because of “narrative choices.” —M.B.

Michelle Monaghan, Constantine

Michelle Monaghan completed work on Francis Lawrence’s Constantine, but never appeared in the final cut as the demonic love interest of Keanu Reeves’ character John Constantine. Lawrence explained his decision in an interview after the film’s release, telling About.com, “Michelle was fantastic and one of her scenes we had to cut was one of my favorite scenes we shot in this movie. We cut because it took away from Constantine’s loneliness… it just affected the way the movie felt and that’s why we had to cut it.” —M.B.

Tim Roth, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Tim Roth appears in four Quentin Tarantino films — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, and The Hateful Eight — but eagle-eyed viewers will see him credited with five. The English heavy’s name sits alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in the closing credits of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but he’s nowhere to be found onscreen, having been sliced from the theatrical cut.

“He’s part of the gang and I appreciate him showing up and giving his due diligent service,” Tarantino told Empire following the film’s 2019 release. “He was Jay Sebring’s British butler, his British gentleman’s gentleman. It was a funny little sequence, but it got dropped.” —R.C.

Mickey Rourke, The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line almost included an appearance by Mickey Rourke. The boxer was expected to star alongside Nick Nolte, Jim Caviezel, and Sean Penn, but had all of his scenes cut by the famously fickle director. Rourke said of the exclusion in 2005, “It was some of the best work I ever did. There were political reasons why I was out of the movie. That really upset me.” —M.B.

Paul Rudd, Bridesmaids

Paul Rudd was originally included in the hilarious Paul Feig movie, playing a very angry man who goes on a blind date with Kristen Wiig’s character of Annie Walker.

Wiig touched on the decision to cut out Rudd in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, explaining, “We did screenings, and when he popped up on screen, people just went crazy. You rarely get to see that side of Paul Rudd because he’s such a nice person, you know, and in this scene he’s such an a–hole. We had so much fun the days he was there and it was so incredibly painful. Our first cut was so long. It’s the hardest thing to have to cut stuff.” —M.B.

Uma Thurman, Savages

Uma Thurman never made it into Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Don Winslow’s Savages. The star was supposed to play the mother to Ophelia Sage (Blake Lively), but was axed in the editing process.

Stone explained to HuffPost, “We ended up cutting characters from the book, like the mother. She was a good character — Uma Thurman played her beautifully — and the scenes were good, but you don’t have time, you know? We have one goal in the movie, and you go out that gate and it’s like a horse race.” —M.B.

Liv Tyler, Everyone Says I Love You

Liv Tyler worked with Edward Norton and Drew Barrymore on Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, but was shut out of the final film. She signed on to play a small role as the love interest of Scott Dandridge (Lukas Haas), explaining to The London Times in 1999, “[Allen] wrote me a letter, which I keep on my desk and look at occasionally, saying that he was really sorry and it was nice to work with me and we would work again. But he’s never asked me again.” —M.B.

Rachel Weisz, To the Wonder

Rachel Weisz was another victim of Malick’s editing process when she got cut out of 2012’s To the Wonder. The British star was left out alongside Jessica Chastain, Michael Sheen, and Amanda Peet, and told Italy’s La Stampa of the project in 2012, “I had the experience of working with [Malick] but I will not have the pleasure of seeing my work.” —M.B.

Shailene Woodley, The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Shailene Woodley filmed a handful of scenes as Mary Jane Watson — the role played by Kirsten Dunst in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy — for Sony’s Andrew Garfield-starring The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But, as EW put it at the time, the actress was “bumped” to the planned third film in the franchise.

“Based on the proposed plot, I completely understand the need for holding off on introducing MJ until the next film,” Woodley told EW. Unfortunately, middling reviews and a less-than-desirable box office haul nixed those plans, with Sony rebooting its approach to the web-slinger a few years later. —R.C.