Top 10 Ensemble Movies Where They Couldn't Keep a Straight Face

Dangerous stunts, explosions, and high-speed driving don’t leave much room for spontaneity. In fact, things on the sets of the “Fast and Furious” movies are tightly controlled due to the precision and volatile conditions that arise from such fantastic stunt work. That doesn’t mean the cast doesn’t have fun in the less action-oriented scenes. This back-and-forth between Dwayne Johnson and Tyrese Gibson in the sixth entry ended up going viral. Gibson’s offhanded joke about baby oil apparently wasn’t supposed to have a comeback. Co-star Ludacris suggested a comeback for Johnson that wasn’t in the script, and the moment ended up being so funny, his spit take was genuine. Johnson’s propensity to improvise was also on display in “The Fate of the Furious.”

This raunchy comedy about four teenage boys looking to lose their virginity before they graduate had its fair share of crazy comedic set pieces. In one scene, for example, actor Eddie Kaye Thomas had to simulate an embarrassing gastrointestinal event. Sure, it may be adolescent humor, but the sound of a gas attack is funny no matter how old you are. If you look closely, Thomas’ red-faced, convulsing act does feature a few quick, character breaking smirks. Given how young the cast was, it’s not surprising how much everyone on set was always cracking up.

Featuring some of the era’s most famous comedians and actors, this crazy ensemble movie pits Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, James Franco, and Craig Robinson against the apocalypse. Playing heightened versions of themselves, it’s safe to say they brought a lot of their personal senses of humor to the roles. The chaos levels are off the charts. Script changes, spontaneous humor, and genuinely deranged humor seemed to be the vibe on set, with changes being made on the spur of the moment. Needless to say, this made the jokes that much harder to prepare for. One of Rogen’s breaks actually made it into a scene where James Franco and Danny McBride are fighting over common courtesy regarding certain bodily emissions.

This wild political satire involves a British RAF officer, a wimpy American president, and a former Nazi caught up in the imminent detonation of nuclear warheads. Even wilder than the premise is that those three characters are played by the same actor. Peter Sellers’ gifts for mimicry, accents, and generally unhinged humor came in handy here. Director Stanley Kubrick encouraged the actor to improvise, which made it hard for his fellow performers and the crew to keep a straight face around him. The actor who plays the Russian ambassador can be seen holding back a laugh during Sellers’ scene as the eccentric title character, whose arm seems to have a mind of its own.

Yes, it became an insanely successful blockbuster. However, the predominantly young cast of the first “Star Wars” had no reason to believe that audiences could take words like “Jedi” and “Wookie” seriously. In fact, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and even veteran actor Alec Guinness could barely get some of the words out without laughing. But their on-set antics had another purpose. The actors noticed how depressed and stressed out writer-director George Lucas was, and just wanted to cheer him up. According to Mark Hamill, that seemed to annoy him more than anything else.

Sharing a scene with Will Ferrell sounds like a constant “Try Not to Laugh” test. The first “Anchorman” movie had its fair share of antics that ended up on the cutting room floor, but things just devolved on the set of the 2013 sequel. From Ferrell’s increasingly zany catchphrases to new addition Kristen Wiig’s hysterical outtakes with Steve Carell, the set looks like an experiment designed to break any actor’s concentration. An early scene sees Christina Applegate breaking character as Ferrell, in character as Ron Burgundy, screams through a vocal warmup. Paul Rudd recalled a scene he couldn’t get through because of Ferrell’s obscene improvisations about a Mrs. Butterworth bottle.

In this British film about bumbling criminals, Jamie Lee Curtis plays a backstabbing femme fatale trying to swindle her lover, an idiotic sociopath played by Kevin Kline, out of his share of the loot. Curtis says she ruined so many of Kline’s takes that she wouldn’t be surprised if he harbored some resentment toward her. During their love scene, which is one of the most ridiculous love scenes ever shot, she had to have a pillow over her face to keep from wrecking the take. There’s even a scene on a dock where she’s supposed to be mad, but you can see her start to break.

While Steve Carell’s title character is the protagonist, this is such a stacked cast of comedic talent that it feels like an ensemble piece. Director Judd Apatow rarely called cut on set. The actors were given free reign to improvise, which led to a lot of hilarious footage that would never get used. But the famed chest waxing scene was where everyone had a hard time keeping it together. Equal parts funny and horrifying, actor Steve Carell really did have his chest waxed in front of the camera. Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen stayed, while co-star Romany Malco fled the room. As the torturous scene goes on, Rudd and Rogen’s mischievous smiles and strained laughter seem genuine.

Keeping a straight face is even harder when everyone else gets to laugh. A classic scene from “Life of Brian” sees Michael Palin, in character as Pontius Pilate, questioning a group of centurions as to why they find his friend’s name funny. That friend’s name, of course, is very, very close to something hilariously vulgar. It was especially hard to shoot because while the actors playing the centurions were supposed to laugh, Palin and Graham Chapman couldn’t laugh without ruining the scene. So, while the rest of the actors around them were able to release a little tension, they had to hold it all in.

A movie about murder, mayhem, and one warped criminal mastermind may not seem like a laughing matter, but tell that to the cast of “The Usual Suspects.” During the iconic scene that jump starts all the action, actors Kevin Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio del Toro, Kevin Pollak, and Stephen Baldwin stand in a police lineup. When del Toro steps forward to say his line, the actors are already laughing. Apparently, it was because the actor had passed gas just before the take. Actor Gabriel Byrne later said Bryan Singer kept the footage because it was a genuine moment of camaraderie between the men.

What do you like most about actors breaking up on film, and who does it best? Tell us in the comments.