Second time lucky

Martin Sheen as Captain Willard, “Apocalypse Now”

Original Casting Choice: Director Francis Ford Coppola fired Harvey Keitel two weeks into the film’s production. As film buffs know, this was hardly the worst crisis to plague the notoriously difficult making of the hallucinatory Vietnam War epic.

Why the Switch Worked: As the combat-ravaged Willard journeys downriver to confront the loony Colonel Kurtz, Sheen conveys a world of hurt through a haunted, intense gaze. And at least some of the pain wasn’t make-believe—Sheen famously tussled with the nearly Kurtz-ian (if brilliant) Coppola and suffered a heart attack during the shoot.