When animal cruelty forced John C Reilly to quit a Lars von Trier movie: “I cut all the scenes”
To say Lars von Trier has been a controversial figure throughout his career is an understatement. The Danish director has consistently tested the limits of good taste, both in his films and in public. He famously caused outrage after making a comment about sympathising with Adolf Hitler—something many hoped was a poorly judged joke.
Despite his reputation, von Trier has continued to attract major Hollywood talent, with actors like Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, and Kirsten Dunst all appearing in his work. One name not on that list, however, is John C Reilly, who walked away from a von Trier project after a dispute involving an animal scene on set.
By the time Von Trier made Dogville in 2003, he had built his reputation as European cinema’s premier provocateur with movies like Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and The Idiots. When Kidman signed up to travel to Trollhättan, Sweden, to work with the maverick director, though, her agent tried everything to stop her. That film was a formal experiment with minimal sets and an unnerving abundance of sexual assault in the story, and her agent was worried her client was making a mistake.
Ultimately, Dogville was a success, leading Lars von Trier to release a sequel, Manderlay, two years later. This time, Nicole Kidman did not return—whether due to scheduling conflicts or reluctance remains unclear—and was replaced by Bryce Dallas Howard in the role of Grace Mulligan. The film featured an impressive cast, including Willem Dafoe, Lauren Bacall, Chloë Sevigny, Danny Glover, and John Hurt. One actor who didn’t appear, however, was John C Reilly, who had initially been cast as a corrupt tradesman but exited the project before filming began.
At that time, Reilly was riding high from a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar nomination for 2002’s Chicago, and he had also starred in critically acclaimed movies like Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Hours. He got more than he bargained for when he touched down in Sweden and met Von Trier for the first time, though. On that particular day, Von Trier had been fishing and had caught an enormous trout, which he cooked up as part of a celebration for the cast and crew.
However, Reilly is a big believer in animal rights, and he told the director that he disagreed with catching your own fish. In fact, he planned to keep it secret from his children that hamburgers came from slaughtered cows until they were 18 years old. To this, a fellow cast member joked that Reilly cared more about animals than people, and Howard lightly joked, “It’s good nobody talked about the donkey then.”
To Reilly’s horror, he discovered that Von Trier intended for the donkey killed and cut up for meat by the characters in the film to be a real animal slaughtered on camera. Reilly had assumed it would have been a prosthetic or model donkey, but Von Trier dismissively claimed a synthetic animal “would cost half the budget of the film.” So, the director revealed that he had secured a donkey that was scheduled to be slaughtered anyway, and a veterinarian would oversee its death on the film set. This, he claimed, would be a better demise than it would have otherwise endured – but then he insensitively called the animal “this poor old suicidal donkey.”
Reilly baulked at both the act and Von Trier’s flippant attitude. He insisted he would walk off the film if the donkey killing weren’t removed. Von Trier argued that the animal’s death would be on his conscience, not Reilly’s, but this did little to assuage his anger and distress. Von Trier refused to back down, though, stating, “I agree with him that you should treat animals right, but from an artistic point, I just couldn’t be blackmailed into changing my mind.”
Naturally, that was the last time Reilly and Von Trier ever crossed paths, as Reilly made good on his promise and immediately boarded a plane home. His character was recast, and the shoot proceeded as normal, with a nonplussed Von Trier even quipping, “He said something I found interesting. ‘You shouldn’t kill a donkey for entertainment.’ I said, ‘Ah, that proves that you know very little about my films. I don’t think anybody will find them entertaining.'”
However, perhaps Reilly’s protestations did get through to the stubborn director. You see, while he went ahead and shot the scene as planned, he wound up removing it from the film’s final cut. In a letter to an animal rights group, he argued, “I cut all the scenes showing the dead donkey out of the film. My personal feeling is that I acted conscientiously, and I don’t suppose we’ll ever agree on that.”
