2001’s Scary Movie 2 famously opens with James Woods playing a priest in a parody of The Exorcist, which had just been re-released in theaters a year earlier. Upon arriving at a house he’s been asked to perform an exorcism in, Woods, as Father McFeely, begins by blessing the place—meaning he goes and takes a violent crap in the upstairs bathroom. He then heads in to see a young girl believed to be possessed by the devil, whom he attempts to have sex with just prior to pulling out a gun and shooting her in the head. You can check out the entire opening segment below.
Memorable as Woods’s cameo ended up being, he very nearly missed out on doing it. As a matter of fact, the Wayans brothers had already cast Godfather star Marlon Brando in Woods’s role when the movie went into production—for a whopping $2 million. Unfortunately, as much as Brando wanted to play the part, he was too sick at the time, and the filmmakers didn’t feel like it was a good idea to let him go through with it. “He did one day. He had an oxygen mask, and we were like, ‘Yo, we gotta let him go. This guy is not healthy,” Shawn Wayans recalled afterward.
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Natasha Lyonne, who played the young girl in the exorcism scene, talked about working with Brando years later, revealing that he was “very chatty” and wore an earpiece to help him with his lines. The scene at one point required Brando to stand over Lyonne and place his hand on her breast, which didn’t make it into the final cut. The footage they shot was unusable, but Lyonne says she still has a VHS copy of what they filmed that day. Ultimately, Marlon Wayans joked that they didn’t want to be the ones responsible for “killing ‘The Godfather,’” (Brando passed away three years after the film was released).
Before Brando signed on, they reached out to Charlton Heston about playing Father McFeely, but he turned them down. The Wayans brothers also had a pretty wild idea for who could replace Brando: former president Bill Clinton. However, they’d only tossed his name around and never actually contacted Clinton about being in the movie. “But we had to really come to our senses and say, ‘He was the president.’ He had to take an oath, so there are certain things he just can’t do, like appearing in a movie like ours—the s—t we had him doing!” Shawn told the New York Post a month ahead of the film’s premiere.
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