The actors who refused to die on screen: “Rage against the dying of the light”
It’s fair to say that when a cinema death scene is done right, it can make rather than break the film to which it belongs. An air of emotion can ring through an audience as their favourite character finally meets their tragic end or even moments of pure comedy can arrive as fictional characters finally give into the white light before them.
We’ve seen some rather ridiculous death scenes in cinema, such as Kanaga’s end in Live and Let Die, and others that have cut us to our core, like Bambi’s mother’s tragedy and Roy Batty’s final moments on the rooftop in Blade Runner, proving that there’s a wide variety in using such a moment to deliver a narrative.
However, throughout the course of cinematic history, several actors have stood up for themselves and rejected death scenes or even entire jobs, desperate for their characters (or careers) to continue to live. We’ve rounded up a short selection of the high-profile actors who simply refused to keel over and die.
We begin with Kristen Stewart, who was offered a role in Scream 4 at around the same time that she was finishing up with the Twilight movies. The role in question would have seen Stewart pop her clogs in the film’s pre-title sequence, which mirrored Drew Barrymore’s death in the original scream. However, knowing that she had Barrymore to contend with, Stewart rejected the job, noting, “I can’t do a Drew. I can’t touch that.”
In the fourth Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol, Jeremy Renner played the character William Brandt and very nearly made his way into the fifth movie, Rogue Nation. The only way for that to happen, though, would have been for Renner’s character to have been killed in a pre-title sequence, something that he was not prepared to agree to. Director Christopher McQuarrie had told Empire, “Jeremy was like, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ He was smart not to take the short paycheck for three days of work and getting blown up.”
Early in Queen Latifah’s acting career, she found that her characters were often set up to die, so much so that, eventually, she had it written into her contracts that they would not be on the receiving end of such a fate. “If I keep dying in these movies,” she had told Drew Barrymore, “I can’t do a sequel. [So] no more dying. No more getting shot up by 300 bullets in this car.”
The realm of television has also seen a series of its notable actors try to dodge their characters’ deaths, including Sarah Wayne Callies, who played Doctor Sara Tancredi in Prison Break (killed off in season three), Dennis Haybert, known for his role as President David Palmer in 24 (shot dead in season five) and Colin Baker, aka the sixth Doctor Who, who was unprepared to give up the role when it was time for the famous British sci-fi character to “regenerate”.
But the king of onscreen death has to be Sean Bean, who has remarkably died 30 times across his career, most notably in Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. In fact, Bean dying so often has led him to turn down any future role that has his character fade into non-existence, and the actor once told The Sun, “I’ve turned down stuff. I’ve said, ‘They know my character’s going to die because I’m in it!’ I just had to cut that out and start surviving; otherwise, it was all a bit predictable.”
Check out a compilation of the times Bean’s on-screen characters have met their maker below.
