You Forgot Andrew Scott in Spielberg’s Greatest — And It Still Hurts 27 Years Later

If you ever bragged about spotting Andrew Scott in Saving Private Ryan, you weren’t hallucinating — but you probably had to pause the movie to prove it. He’s there, technically, for a blink-and-you-miss-it beat on Omaha Beach. It’s a great bit of trivia with a weird backstory, and yes, it involves a scheduling tug-of-war with Disney.

The cameo you missed on the beach

In the opening D-Day sequence, Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller rolls over a shell-shocked, unnamed soldier on the sand. That soldier is Andrew Scott. Hanks mutters something you can’t really make out, the camera moves on, and that’s the whole thing. We’re talking seconds.

How it was supposed to go (and why it didn’t)

Back in 1997, Scott was 21 and on the rise. He told Vanity Fair he was originally cast in a small but real part — five or six lines — playing a soldier on the verge of dying. Then his other job got in the way: he was shooting the Disney TV movie Miracle at Midnight, which, ironically, is also set during World War II. Disney wouldn’t let him out of that commitment, so Spielberg’s team shrank his role to basically a face in the carnage.

"I got cast in this, five or six lines [part], this guy who was about to lose his life. I was filming a Disney film at the time called Miracle at Midnight, and they wouldn’t let me out to be in this Spielberg movie. I was absolutely devastated that I couldn’t do this film. And so they ended up giving me this much, much smaller part... It was still an extraordinary experience just to be on this extraordinary, long stretch of beach."

For the record, Miracle at Midnight didn’t exactly turn into a breakout either — another minor role there — but Scott clearly loved just being part of Spielberg’s war epic at all.

Why Saving Private Ryan still hits like a truck

The opening 27 minutes are still a brutal masterclass in sound, camera work, and controlled chaos. When it hit theaters in 1998, that level of visceral realism — blood, mud, bodies, panic — was a shock to the system. Spielberg won his second Best Director Oscar for it, and the film basically set the tone for modern war movies. You can feel its fingerprints on 1917, Fury, Dunkirk, and a lot of what followed.

• Title: Saving Private Ryan
• Release year: 1998 (shot in 1997)
• Director: Steven Spielberg
• Writer: Robert Rodat
• Genre: War, drama
• Setting: World War II, mostly Normandy and occupied France
• Premise: After the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, a squad is sent behind enemy lines to find Private James Ryan and bring him home after his three brothers are killed in action
• Main characters: Captain John H. Miller, Private James Francis Ryan
• Main cast: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Giovanni Ribisi

Tom Hanks anchors the whole thing, as usual. And while Scott’s part is a blip here, he did just fine afterwards — Sherlock, Fleabag, all the good stuff. Sometimes the near-miss becomes the fun story later.

Saving Private Ryan is currently streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S.