Forum: movies.stackexchange.com
Tags: <casting><credits>
Title: Top-billed actor with the least screen time
Question: What is the least amount of screen time, relative to the total running length, that the single highest-billed actor (or actress) has ever had in a feature-length, non-experimental film?  (For the purposes of this question, "screen time" includes time spent doing voice-overs.)

Answers:
sents: text: There are a lot of films with actors/actresses who dominate the film, but actually have very little screen time.
text: For example, Orson Welles in
text: The Third Man had ~10 minutes of screen time.
text: Heath Ledger in
text: The Dark Knight had just under 20 minutes.
text: Judi Dench won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love for less than 8 minutes acting time.
text: Similarly, Beatrice Straight won an Oscar for Network , based on ~10 minutes acting time.
text: Anne Hathaway also won an Oscar for Les Miserables , based on ~15 minutes screen time.
text: Of course, the problem with all of these is that they don't fit the scope of your question - in that the actors involved, whilst highly billed, were not the highest billed.
text: Given this, the best answer I can think of is
text: The Silence of the Lambs , starring, as the joint top-billed actor, Anthony Hopkins .
text: He had less than 16 minutes of screen time, which is more than the others above, but at least shared the top billing.
text: Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to verify anything lower than this.
text: There are plenty of people who have had high billing despite having a mere cameo, but I'm not aware of anyone actually leading the credit listings with a lower time than this (although I'll happily amend my answer if I find anyone).
text: Edit : Marlon Brando in Superman received joint top billing with Gene Hackman (who played Lex Luthor).
text: Christopher Reeve, who played Superman, was billed much lower as he was relatively unknown at the time.
text: Brando has ~8 minutes of screen time , which is much less than Anthony Hopkins.
text: Edit 2 :
text: If joint top billing is to be allowed, as many have commented Mark Hamill, who shared top-billing with a host of other people, had a mere minute or two of on-screen presence in Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens .
text: Edit 3 :
text: Neither of us have confirmed this, but @Thunderforge has suggested Tobin Bell in Saw 3D, who was given solo top billing and
text: apparently only had two minutes of screen play.
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/8219/Andrew Martin
score: 41
sents: text: EDIT:
text: We might have a new record.
text: In the US historical epic One Night with the King from 2006, Peter O'Toole briefly appears in the prologue as the Prophet Samuel for "barely 30 seconds" , according to Leonard Maltin's 2015 Movie Guide .
text: (I timed it myself
text: and it's about 25 seconds).
text: Despite this, he's top-billed as the film's star:
text: Another notable example would be Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space from 1959.
text: It's a B-movie, but by all means not experimental or avant-garde.
text: It was famously filmed after Bela Lugosi's death and more or less based around some brief, silent footage of him which Wood shot before he died.
text: Wood originally promoted it as "Bela Lugosi's last movie", and to make Bela's role more prominent, Wood then hired his wife's chiropractor as a stand in.
text: So, although Lugosi's actual screen time is under 3 minutes (I counted it myself),
text: he's still top-billed in the original promotional art :
text: [However, there is also the dubious practice of retroactively displaying a famous actor prominently in the promotional art of their older, more obscure films in which they only briefly appeared.
text: TVTropes calls this Billing Displacement and features a few trillion examples, so you might find some more fitting titles there too.]
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/4386/Walt
score: 37
sents: text: Steve McQueen was the top billed actor of The Great Escape .
text: He has very few lines, and spends almost all his screen time throwing a baseball off a wall into his glove.
text: Supposedly he was slated to have even less (and was nearly thrown out of the movie entirely), but insisted on being given something "heroic" to do.
text: Part of the problem, it seemed, was McQueen’s determination that his character remain cool and inscrutable. '
text: We finally figured out,’ Garner said, '“Steve, you want to be the hero, but you don’t want to do anything heroic.”’
text: So a scene was added near the end of him failing to escape on a motorcycle.
text: But even that scene was done by a stunt-double, not McQueen himself.
text: I can't find a definitive number for McQueen's screen time online, nor a stream of the movie.
text: However, youtube has a series of 11 clips .
text: Adding up his screen time from all of them, it appears that he had at least 10 minutes of screen time in the movie, which works out to a bit less than 6%.
text: But that's a lower bound, not upper.
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/21021/T.E.D.
score: 5
sents: text: There are a lot of good answers, but there is one movie that is notorious for having the top-billed actor have very little screen time.
text: The movie Game Of Death (1978) stars Bruce Lee, well kind of.
text: All you history buffs know where I am going with this.
text: Bruce Lee was already long dead before this movie was released.
text: There was tons of archive footage that wasn't being used, so the film makers decided to make an entire movie using these clips.
text: Unfortunately, they did not have enough footage, so they had to insert cardboard cutouts of Lee
text: (I kid you not)
text: as a stand in.
text: Here is a clip showing just how egregious some of these scenes are.
text: Cardboard Cutout Bruce
text: Bruce Lee is the top-billed actor in this film, yet he did not actually act in this movie.
text: The acting for this film that he did was technically 0 minutes.
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/30467/Jason Hutchinson
score: 4
sents: text: Alec Baldwin, Blake, 7:23 of 100:00 (7.3%), Glengarry Glen Ross, billing (third or shared first, I don't find querier has resolved in other comments):
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/27275/Eric Towers
score: 3
sents: text: George Clooney, The Thin Red Line (1998)
text: Albeit having a huge ensemble cast, in this 2-hour 50-minute feature he has less than maybe 2 minutes of screen time.
answer_details: author: movies.stackexchange.com/users/18232/nperson325681
score: 2

Summary of the answers:
The Silence of the Lambs, One Night with the King and Game of Death and The Thin RedLine are just some of the films where a top-billed actor has very little screen time. As far as
There are a lot of films with actors/actresses who dominate the film, but actually have very little screen time.