15 Strange, Strict Demands That Studios Put In Actors' Contracts, From Forbidding Them To Cut Their Hair To Forcing Them To Get Married

15 Strange, Strict Demands That Studios Put In Actors' Contracts, From Forbidding Them To Cut Their Hair To Forcing Them To Get Married,Adriana Caselotti, who voiced the titular princess in <i>Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs</i>, was offered a spot on Jack Benny's radio show after the film's initial release. However, Walt Disney himself reportedly blocked her from taking the job because he didn't "want to spoil the illusion of Snow White."

15 Strange, Strict Demands That Studios Put In Actors’ Contracts, From Forbidding Them To Cut Their Hair To Forcing Them To Get Married

You’ve probably heard rumors about actors putting wild demands into their contracts, but studios have enacted strange rules of their own since the Old Hollywood days.

Here are 15 wild and extreme rules actors have had to follow:

1. According to Annabelle Wallis, Tom Cruise doesn’t allow his costars to run onscreen with him. However, she convinced him to make an exception for her in The Mummy.

She told the Hollywood Reporter, “He told me no at first. He said, ‘Nobody runs onscreen [with me],’ and I said, ‘But I’m a really good runner.’ So I would time my treadmill so that he’d walk in and see me run. And then he added all these running scenes. So that was it. It was, like, better than an Oscar. I was so happy! I was so happy that I got to run onscreen with Tom Cruise.”

2. During the entire three and a half months it took to film Lincoln, director Steven Spielberg didn’t call any of the actors by their actual names. He only referred to them by their characters’ names, including calling Daniel Day-Lewis “Mr. President.”

Spielberg also wore a suit every day to help immerse himself in the story.

On 60 Minutes, he said, “I think that I wanted to get into that role more than anybody else, of being part of that experience. Because we were re-creating a piece of history, I didn’t want to look like the schlubby, baseball-cap-wearing 21st-century guy. I wanted to be like the cast.”

3. Because of Old Hollywood’s production code, actors playing couples weren’t allowed to share a bed onscreen, even if their characters were married. The rule also applied to actor couples who were married in real life, such as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy.

The strict censorship rules were introduced after Mae West’s movie I’m No Angel premiered in 1933.

4. During production on Avengers: Endgame, Tom Holland wasn’t allowed to see any portion of the script beyond his own lines — not even the names of the characters he was speaking to — because he “has a very difficult time keeping his mouth shut.”

During an Avengers: Endgame Indian Anthem event in 2019, codirector Joe Russo said, “He doesn’t even know who he’s acting opposite of. We’ll just, we use, like, very vague terms to describe to him what is happening in the scene.”

5. Bella Thorne claimed that, while she was starring on Shake It Up, Disney made her use a higher-pitched voice in interviews because they didn’t think her naturally deeper voice would appeal to young viewers.

She told Harper’s Bazaar that she endured “a mentality where you don’t know who you are” during her time on Disney Channel.

6. During the days of Hollywood’s studio system, Lucille LeSueur’s contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer required her to change her name because they thought her last name was too close to “sewer.” Rather than let her choose, they ran a magazine contest, then bestowed her with the winning name — Joan Crawford.

She reportedly hated the name because it sounded like “crawfish” to her.

7. Similarly, Universal arranged for Rock Hudson, who was gay, to marry Phyllis Gates, his agent’s secretary, because the studio “invested a lot of money in Rock, and it was important for his image to remain that of a lady-killer.”

In 1985, Ken Maley, the actor’s friend, told People magazine, “Rock said the studio set up the marriage and promoted the wedding and the honeymoon. He was very bitter about that.”

8. On the other hand, MGM allegedly put a clause in Jean Harlow’s contract that forbade her to get married because they thought being a wife would ruin her image as a “bombshell.”

Therefore, she wasn’t allowed to marry her partner William Powell.

9. Rebel Wilson’s Pitch Perfect contract forbade her to lose or gain more than 10 pounds during her tenure as Fat Amy.

On the Call Her Daddy podcast, she said, “But I had been thinking for a while, like, ‘Oh, I want to get healthier.’ And I was stereotyped in playing that fat, funny friend, which is so hard because I love those roles. I love doing the roles. I love those characters. I did want to do more things, but I felt like, being the bigger girl, you’re just more pigeonholed.”

10. When Pierce Brosnan played James Bond in Goldeneye, he was reportedly not allowed to wear a tuxedo in any other movies.

Reportedly, that’s why he had to wear his shirt unbuttoned and tie undone during the fancy ball scene in The Thomas Crown Affair.

11. During his time as Jon Snow, Kit Harington’s Game of Thrones contract required him to keep his hair long, which he regretted agreeing to. He felt that he’d screwed himself over after learning that several women on the cast got around similar rules by wearing wigs.

He told Metro, “I don’t want the bother of it all, really. If you look a certain way or you have a certain look, it dominates what people think you are. So I’ll cut it off quite soon. As soon as I’m allowed.”

12. RKO didn’t want Katharine Hepburn to wear pants, which was considered a controversial fashion choice for women at the time, so they reportedly confiscated her jeans from her dressing room.

However, instead of complying by putting on a skirt, she came back to set in her underwear until they gave her the pants back.

13. According to Palak Tiwari, her Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan costar Salman Khan has a rule regarding women’s clothing on sets that dictates the height of their necklines because he believes “all the girls should be covered, like good, proper girls.”

She told Siddharth Kannan, “He’s a traditionalist … he’s always like, ‘My girls should always be protected.’ If there are men around, whom she doesn’t personally know, it’s not his personal space where he doesn’t trust everyone, he’s like, ‘The girl should be safe, always.'”