John Rhys-Davies

The role that made him wasn't supposed to be his. Danny DeVito passed on Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark to stay on Taxi, and the vacancy landed on John Rhys-Davies. The original script had Sallah as a thin 5'2" Bedouin. Steven Spielberg told him to play it as a cross between his Shogun character and John Falstaff. He'd spent the 1970s grinding through BBC prestige television, I, Claudius among it, but that one open slot made everything else look like warmup.

The LOTR makeup destroyed him. Five hours per day in prosthetics for 14 months, and the adhesive stripped cellular skin from around his eyes with each removal. Histamine responses swelled his face so badly that makeup artists regularly sent him home: "There is nothing we can stick it to." His stunt double took over so much filming that Beattie may have logged more screen time as Gimli than he did. He threw the prosthetic into a fire the day filming ended. Politically, he's the lone openly conservative voice in Hollywood who says what he thinks, and acknowledges the cost: "Every time I open my mouth, I may be committing career suicide."

He lost the tip of his left middle finger changing a van engine before any of this happened. During The Two Towers, a gel prosthetic filled the gap, and he used it to run a convincing prank on Peter Jackson: they filled the tip with stage blood and told Jackson it had just been severed on set. That shook the director properly. He's also the only Fellowship actor who never got the cast tattoo of "nine" in Tengwar script. His stunt double got the offer instead. Before any of the fame, he was a radical leftist whose heckling of a young Tory MP in the 1960s backfired badly. The MP was Margaret Thatcher.