Having the opportunity to star in a feature film is a great one, and that’s especially true if that film is being directed by Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and features Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy as the leads. It was this exact situation that young actor Forrest Goodluck found himself in after being cast as Hugh Glass’ son, Hawk, in The Revenant -, though he didn’t exactly leave the best impression after his first ever take during production. In fact, he fell flat on his face… quite literally.
The first sequence that Forrest Goodluck shot during his time on The Revenant was the epic camp invasion that finds his character joining his father fleeing an attacking Arikara tribe. His debut on-screen appearance was designed with him running across the screen, though this didn’t work exactly as planned from the get go. Instead, he found himself having serious trouble with the sloppy environment in which he was running. As the actor explained to me during an interview last month,
It took a month to shoot that entire battle scene. My first shot on set was actually that shot of me running through. And it’s embarrassing, because my first shot ever on a feature film… ever. First shot. Ever on a film. I ran through and tripped in the mud. And I got all of this mud in my face, and I walked up to Alejandro and told him that he baptized me into the industry. Which was nice, but yeah.
You can watch Forrest Goodluck talk about his fun embarrassing moment in the video below:
This surely must have been blush-inducing for Forrest Goodluck when he was actually on set filming The Revenant, but in retrospect it’s probably a good thing that he found himself face down in the mud. After all, there are surely thousands if not millions of actors out there whose very first take in a feature film wasn’t actually all that memorable. Goodluck now has a story to tell for his entire acting career.
So when you go see The Revenant - which is in theaters everywhere now - and watch Forrest Goodluck running past the screen during the invasion sequence, you’ll know in the back of your mind that things didn’t exactly go precisely as planned the first time around.
