Wed, September 30, 2026 at 2:16 AM UTC
It’s common in TV and movies for production to continue even if an actor faces a setback or change. It is not always easy to pause production, so film crews have come up with clever ways to have these adjustments or cast absences go unnoticed or work seamlessly into the plot.
For example, New Girl hid Zooey Deschanel‘s pregnancy by having her character, Jess, spend most of the season serving jury duty.
In an effort to find the best uses of this on-screen deception, Redditor leanice44 asked for everyone’s favorite examples. Here are the 28 that stood out the most to me:
1. “During production of The Big Bang Theory, actress Kaley Cuoco had a horse she was riding roll over on her. The horse broke her leg, and she had to wear a cast for several weeks. To hide the cast, her character Penny was moved from waitress to bartender, giving her a reason to be standing still behind a counter.”
2. “Doctor Who. Leela was introduced halfway through the 1976-77 season (season 14) and was only meant to stay for a few episodes. However, the producers liked her so much that they asked her to stay for the full 1977-78 season (season 15). This led to an issue, however, as the actress had blue eyes, but the character needed brown ones. To compensate for this, she had to wear color-correcting contact lenses, which were extremely uncomfortable. This was fine when she was only going to appear once or twice, but she absolutely refused to wear them for a whole season. To get her out of wearing them, the season 15 opening serial, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’, ends with Leela looking directly into an explosion, which causes her eyes to suddenly become blue.”
3. “In Fringe, actress Anna Torv, who played Olition, the writers quickly added a scene in which her character, FBI Agent Oliplained why she spent the next few episodes walking with a heavy limp and crutches.”
4. “In Se7en, while filming a chase scene, Brad Pitt accidentally put his arm through a windshield, cutting it severely and requiring surgery to repair a torn tendon. Instead of trying to hide the injury, David Fincher incorporated it into the plot, having Pitt’s character break his arm during the chase and spend the rest of the movie with it in a sling.”
5. “In a few episodes of Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Jason David Frank was unavailable to film in person. To get around it, his character ended up being stuck in morphed form, allowing a suit actor to be on set and Frank to record his lines elsewhere without the viewers knowing it wasn’t Frank in the suit.”
6. “Flower’s disappearance in the US version of Ghosts is a prime example. At the beginning of the third season of Ghosts, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2024/04/18/ghosts-season-3-episode-8-recap/73348568007/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Flower, Woodstone Manor’s resident hippie ghost, was thought to have been sucked off (the show’s term for ascension to heaven) because no one could find her. Sam, one of Woodstone Manor’s owners who can see ghosts, saw someone ascend, so it was plausible. It was really one of the ghosts who lived in Woodstone’s basement who ascended, and Flower was instead stuck at the bottom of a well. The reason for her disappearance was that her actress, Sheila Carrasco, was pregnant at the time.”
7. “Doctor Who is the most famous example I can think of. William Hartnell, who played the Doctor, became unable to remember his lines due to worsening health, so the writers introduced the idea that the Doctor can change appearances (and actors) whenever, leading to one of the show’s most iconic aspects.”
8. “On Friends, Matt LeBlanc accidentally dislocated his shoulder during the filming of ‘The One Where No One’s Ready,’ and had to have his arm in a sling for a while. The following episode, ‘The One With the Jam,’ opens with Joey falling and hurting his arm offscreen, so Matt could have a scripted reason to wear his sling while filming.”
9. “‘Nature Boy’ Ric Flair was in a plane crash that injured his back in the 1970s, making him unable to safely take bumps (moves that slammed him on his back). As a result, they altered his entire style. He was a submission specialist, and any extended match with him involved minutes of wrestlers struggling to get out of his signature figure-four leg lock. It was almost a running joke how bad he was off the top rope, because that allowed him to miss whatever dramatic move he was attempting, but take a side bump instead.”
He also had comedic elements built in to help him control his bumps while still allowing him to seem beatable, like delayed reactions to abuse. He would be losing, but just wouldn’t go down until he suddenly stumbled a bit and then collapsed as all the abuse hit him at once. As a result, he continued to wrestle well into the 2000s. Flair vs Shawn Micheals is a certified classic, and it was in 2008.”
10. “Right before filming The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, got into a massive car accident that fractured his nose and cheekbone, leaving permanent facial scars. To explain his altered look, George Lucas added a scene at the very beginning of the movie where a snow monster slashes Luke across the face.”
11. “Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Seinfeld had a couple of hidden pregnancies. She got pregnant twice during the show, in season three and again in season eight, and both times they hid her baby bump behind loose shirts and furniture. Before the second time, in season eight, Jerry Seinfeld suggested, ‘What if Elaine just gets fat this year?’ At the time, Julia was deeply offended. Decades later, she said it was a great idea, and they should’ve done it.”
12. “In Top Gun: Maverick, the writers wanted to do a reunion of Iceman and Maverick, but Val Kilmer’s current medical condition prevented any kind of active scene. To still achieve the reunion, Admiral Kazansky was written with a medical condition identical to Kilmer’s in real life so that the scene could be possible and comfortable for Kilmer to film.”
13. “During season two of Supernatural, Jared Padalecki broke his wrist during a stunt for the episode ‘Bloodlust.’ They had his character, Sam Winchester, have his arm broken by a vampire to explain the cast that he wore for the next couple of episodes. Additionally, right before season ten, Jared and castmate Osric Chau were wrestling, and Jared dislocated his shoulder. He had to wear a sling while filming the next episodes. They worked that in as well, saying a demon had dislocated it.”
14. “In It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Dee got pregnant and refused to tell the gang who the father was, implying it was one of them for a whole season. It wasn’t until much later that it was revealed she was just a paid surrogate and wanted to make them suffer for nine months. This creative decision most likely can be linked to actress Kaitlin Olson’s pregnancy.”
15. “In Xena: Warrior Princess, they had just finished filming an episode where Xena switched bodies with Calisto, her evil thematic opposite warrior lady. Then Xena’s actress, Lucy Lawless, broke her pelvis riding a horse for a late-night show skit. So, the show just reshot the ending of the body-swap episode and kept it going for two or three episodes.”
16. “A lot of episodes of Community were filmed without Chevy Chase for various reasons. There was always a joke written in about how his character was off doing sensitivity training or doing some retreat with his cult, but in reality he is, and historically has been, very difficult to work with. One of his character’s last appearances was as a Muppet, as they could just add his voice over later.”
17. “In Lost, actor Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley, did not lose weight during filming, but his character was stranded on a desert island with scarce food. To explain why Hurley stayed heavy, the writers added a plotline where he discovers a hidden bunker packed with decades’ worth of Apollo candy bars and canned food that he secretly ate while stranded on the island.”
18. “Not sure if it meets all the criteria, but the Riker character in Star Trek: The Next Generation had a unique way of sitting in chairs. He would kind of throw one leg over the top of the chair while sitting down. This is due to a back injury to the actor, Jonathan Frakes, which caused his back to stay stiff, making sitting more traditionally nearly impossible.”
19. “In Grey’s Anatomy, Ellen Pompeo, who plays the titular Meredith Grey, had asthma and was at high risk for COVID. The show was still filmed throughout the peak of the COVID pandemic. That season, her character is in a coma and only has scenes in her mind on a beach. They did this so she could film her scenes outside and be at a lower risk of getting sick from a castmate or the film crew.”
20. “Chris Pratt was filming seasons of Parks and Recreation and Guardians of the Galaxy at the same time. Pratt had to lose weight and get quite buff for Guardians of the Galaxy. They acknowledged this in Parks and Recreation, as the weight loss was pretty massive, and it would be weird to just ignore it. His character said he lost 50 pounds in a month just by not drinking as much beer.”
21. “In Scrubs, there is an episode called ‘My Drive-Byin’ that features Doug in a mobility scooter (which Dr. Kelso steals in the episode), after he broke his feet while working in the hospital’s morgue. In reality, actor Johnny Kastl broke both his heels while skiing. Kastl felt it was such a dumb injury and was set to take a break from the show while healing. However, the Scrubs team thought it was such a Doug thing to do that they wrote it in for that episode.”
22. “Gillian Anderson was heavily pregnant for a series of X-Files episodes, so the series costume designers made her bigger and thicker trench coats to wear. The cinematographers obscured her body with objects in long shots and worked in more head shots than normal. When her pregnancy got very far along, the writers just made her get abducted by aliens (or it seemed like aliens at the time) for a little bit.”
23. “During filming of the Marvel show Agents of SHIELD, actress Ming-Na Wen, who played Agent May, injured her leg. To deal with this, in the season five premiere, when the characters are all sent forward in time, Agent May materializes around a metal pipe, working the injury logically into the storyline.”
24. “Elliot Page was working on the show The Umbrella Academy when he came out as transgender. In response to this, The writers had his character, Viktor, written as transgender to accommodate Elliot Page coming out. The change actually fit the character really well.”
25. “My favorite example is Michael J. Fox as Louis Canning in both The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Fox has Parkinson’s disease in real life. His character uses his Parkinson’s disease to emotionally manipulate clients, judges, and lawyers to convince people to hire him as their lawyer and win cases. Still one of my favorite recurring characters from both shows and a great real-life tie-in to allow Fox to play a character with his actual illness.”
26. “In Gladiator, there’s a bit early on where Maximus rides his horse face-first into branches. This is because Russell Crowe messed up his face before filming, and the makeup department didn’t want to spend a bunch of time covering up the scars before every shoot, so the writers wrote that in to justify the face scars for the rest of the movie.”
27. “This is probably one of the most extreme examples, but I think a good example of a film crew working on their feet. In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, after Heath Ledger’s death, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell were all brought in to play transformed versions of Ledger’s character in magical realms.”
28. “Dianna Agron, who played Quinn Fabray on Glee, broke her nose between seasons two and three and had to have surgery that made her voice slightly deeper. To explain this on the show, which at the time had Quinn going through a bad-girl phase (at the start of season three). She joined a girl gang called The Skanks in this season. With this gang, she picked up smoking cigarettes, which explained her deepened voice.”
These were all so clever, and I’m not honestly sure I’d have caught on that all of these were cover-ups if I didn’t know. Do you know of any other clever TV and movie cover-ups? Let me hear about them in the comments, or use the anonymous form below to share!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
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