11 Weirdest Hollywood Firings

Selena Gomez gave her own parents the boot as employees yesterday, and is looking for new management. But that's far from the oddest firing Hollywood has ever seen:

• Tom Cruise went the opposite way, firing his publicist in favor of a family member—in his case, he gave his Scientologist sister the job. But just eight months later, his sister resigned and he hired a new publicist.
• Sometimes it's the family members who get the stars fired: The New York Times reports that after Thora Birch's father (a former "adult star" who became his daughter's manager) threatened one of her co-stars during a rehearsal, Birch was fired from an Off Broadway production of Dracula.
• Charlie Sheen fired his Anger Management co-star Selma Blair—via text message—after she complained about how difficult he was to work with. Lionsgate quickly followed suit and made the termination official. (And, of course, that was after Sheen himself got the boot from Two and a Half Men.)

• When Mariska Hargitay got a bad haircut, she was upset. She was even more upset when it almost got her fired from Law & Order: SVU, MSN reports. Series creator Dick Wolf told her, "I've fired people for less," she once told WENN. "I went over to the producer's house and he was like, 'Yeah, that's a problem.' When they saw dailies [at work], they weren't happy."
• Marty McFly was almost played by Eric Stoltz, Wired reports. But Stoltz was fired from Back to the Future after just five weeks of filming because "his comedy sensibilities were very different," according to director Robert Zemeckis. The role, of course, went to Michael J. Fox.
• Damon Wayans was fired after just one season on Saturday Night Live, when he decided—on his own—to play his police officer character in one sketch as flamboyantly gay, Movieline reports.
• Megan Fox learned the hard way that comparing your director to Adolf Hitler is not a good idea: Doing so got her fired from the Transformers franchise.
• Alec Baldwin claims he got Shia LaBeouf fired from a Broadway play.
• Terrence Howard claims Robert Downey Jr. got him fired from Iron Man, even though Howard says he's the one who got RDJ his role as Tony Stark, Indiewire reports. Howard was replaced by Don Cheadle.
• Gilbert Gottfried was fired as the voice of the Aflac duck after tweeting many ill-advised jokes about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Want more? Check out 5 other celebrities who fired their parents, or 4 celebrities who got fired—and ended up being glad of it. (More celebrity stories.)