1.
Judie Dench acknowledged that her performance in Cats was no good, though that was far from the only issue with the critically trashed film. After being nominated for a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress, Dench admitted she hadn’t seen the film. “I didn’t read anything about the response to it, nor have I seen it,” she told the BBC, though she didn’t need to be told they were negative as “you kind of know yourself about something, I think.” Of what she had heard of the film, she thought “people have been rather kind to me.” She also stated she’d misunderstood her character, realizing the cat she was playing was not the one she’d imagined after seeing a photo of her in her CGI costume for the film.
“I once had a cat like that called Carpet,” she said of the fluffy, dignified-looking character. “I didn’t realize that I was playing Carpet. I thought I was playing a really, kind of, clapped out old mangy cat who didn’t have much fur and was at the end of her life. I didn’t realize I was this wonderful show cat!”
2.
Chris Hemsworth was certainly beloved as Thor, but two films fell short of fan expectations — and it turns out, Hemsworth agrees. He was particularly disappointed by his portrayal of Thor in his character’s second solo film, Thor: Dark World. “I wasn’t stoked with what I’d done in Thor 2. I was a little disappointed in what I’d done. I didn’t think I grew the character in any way, I didn’t think I showed an audience something unexpected and different,” he said.
3.
It seemed like things were on the upswing with the beloved Thor: Ragnarok, which injected far more humor into the character and world. However, this swung too far for Thor: Love & Thunder, which was not as popular with fans. “I got caught up in the improv and the wackiness, and I became a parody of myself. I didn’t stick the landing,” Hemsworth told Vanity Fair.
4.
Similarly, Shia LaBeouf seemed to agree with audiences that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull missed the mark. “I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished,” he said. “You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg]. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault. Simple.”
5.
It’s not just franchise stars who struggle with high expectations. Hugh Grant was practically guaranteed to bring in rom-com fans in the ’90s, but one film fell short. Grant screamed when a Variety interviewer asked about Nine Months, saying, he’s “forbidden” his wife from watching it and “put parental controls on the screen so that you can’t get it.” He clarified, “Let me stress, everyone involved with that film, with the exception of me, was brilliant and talented. It was just me that let it down.”
6.
Ralph Fiennes, on the other hand, was a surprising choice for a romantic film. Still, it seemed promising enough. “I’ve always done serious drama and here I am doing this great thing, a romcom with a social-conscience twist,” he thought upon accepting his role in Maid in Manhattan. However, “It didn’t turn out like that. It was produced and packaged in a very different way.” But it wasn’t just the film itself he had issues with: “I think the part required a light, deft, Cary Grant-ish thing, which I quite quickly felt was not my strength. That and doing an American accent, to be honest. I’ve tried it. I’ve worked really hard with dialogue coaches, but I wonder if I’ll ever inhabit an American accent in a completely natural, organic way.”
7.
Emma Watson also had issues with her American accent, which she used for her first large non-Harry Potter role in The Perks of Being a Wallflower “I think it sounded terrible!” she told MTV ahead of the film’s release. While the film is a personal favorite, and I like Watson in it, she’s right about her accent, which seems somewhere between American and British…and far closer to the latter.
8.
Kate Winslet felt the same way about her accent in Titanic, but that wasn’t her only issue with the performance. “Every single scene, I’m like ‘Really, really? You did it like that? Oh my God,'” she told The Telegraph. “Even my American accent, I can’t listen to it. It’s awful,” she said. “Hopefully it’s so much better now. It sounds terribly self indulgent but actors do tend to be very self-critical. I have a hard time watching any of my performances, but watching Titanic I was just like ‘Oh God, I want to do that again.'” However, she still loves the film and looks back fondly on it.
9.
Robin Williams also had issues with the voice he used for a character: specifically, Popeye in the eponymous film. “I had to dub that movie over twice, though, because people couldn’t understand what I was saying. I sounded like a killer whale farting in a wind tunnel,” he revealed to Rolling Stone. “The weirdest thing of all was to watch it at one of those Hollywood premières, which are rough to begin with. But when a film doesn’t work — [simulates a seizure] oooh!”
He also joked in his stand-up special, An Evening with Robin Williams, about his son not wanting to do comedy. “What’s the matter? Ninny ninny wasn’t good enough for you? Popeye wasn’t good enough for you?” he recalls asking his son. In-character as his son, Robin replies, “Popeye wasn’t good enough for anybody. Who are you kidding?”
10.
In another voice-related example, Eddie Redmayne’s choice of a character voice in Jupiter Ascending left something to be desired. Eddie said, “My character had had his larynx ripped out by this wolf man, and so I made the slightly bold choice — which I thought was right. I won a prize for it for the Worst Performance of the Year. So, yeah, it was a pretty bad performance on my account.”
11.
Nicole Kidman admitted to squirming in her seat at the screening of her film Australia, saying she immediately left Australia (as in the country) afterward. Nicole said of the film, “I can’t look at this movie and be proud of what I’ve done. I sat there and I looked at Keith [Urban] and went, ‘Am I any good in this movie?’ … It’s just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all.”
12.
Ewan McGregor called his film Emma, in which he starred as Frank Churchill, the worst thing he’d done workwise: “It’s a good film, Emma, but I’m just…not very good in it,” he admitted.
13.
While shooting Alexander, Colin Farrell actually thought he might win awards. However, as reviews panned it, Farrell decided his performance had been bad, and he was a “crap actor.” He said, “I felt so much shame. I found myself in a place where with everyone I met I wanted to say, ‘Have you seen Alexander? If you have, I’m really sorry.’ I’m not even joking. I wasn’t going to give them their $20 million back, but …” He had to figure out why he had gone into acting before he could continue.
14.
Gary Oldman also thought he’d blown his career due to one role: that of troubled rocker Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy. “I just didn’t like my performance in it, I just thought I wasn’t very good,” he said. “I thought this is it, I’ve had my chance and I’ve blown it.”
15.
Musicals, in particular, seem to attract a lot of regret. Bruce Davison, for example, regretted starring in Grace of My Heart due to his performance. “Illeana [Douglas] has been a friend over the years, and, y’know, it’s one of those ones I regret. I wish I would’ve really gone for the bone more in the love scenes. [Laughs.] I wish I would’ve been more aggressive. I think it would’ve made my character more interesting than to make him as passive as I played him. I think if he were a more aggressive lover, it would’ve made the film work better…for my part, anyway!”
16.
Helena Bonham Carter was reportedly disappointed with her singing in Les Misérables. “I had lots of vocal training for Les Mis, but I didn’t improve as much as I thought I would,” she told the Daily Mail. “I watched it and thought…I was going to be so much better, I thought my voice was going to be so much bigger.”
“I practiced and practiced and practiced but the thing with Les Mis is that it was real so that’s what we sounded like. In Sweeney, I had people making me sound better than I am but not for this.” She went on to say, “I would do another singing (film) role if someone else was foolish enough to employ me but I wouldn’t do a stage musical. I don’t have a strong enough voice. Maybe for one night but with singing it’s like any muscle, it doesn’t last.”
17.
Amanda Seyfried was also no fan of her work on Les Misérables. She even said that she wished she could redo the film. “I still have nightmares about it. … I was very weak. … From a very technical standpoint, I was very unhappy with my singing.”
18.
Emily Blunt also said she was embarrassed by her singing in Into the Woods, even though she’d received vocal training, saying, “Oh, my God! It’s hideous watching it,” though she didn’t clarify if she was ultimately unhappy with her performance.
19.
Zac Efron said he “didn’t know how to dance” in the High School Musical films, mocking, along with the interviewer, a particular move from the number “The Boys Are Back” in High School Musical 3: Senior Year. While he spoke of his positive memories of the filming process, he’s also said of the Zac that starred in HSM, “I step back and look at myself and I still want to kick that guy’s ass sometimes. Like, fuck that guy. He’s done some kind of cool things with some cool people — he did that one thing [Neighbors] that was funny — but, I mean, he’s still just that fucking kid from [High School Musical].”
20.
While this wasn’t a musical, Adam Driver sang briefly in the film Inside Llewyn Davis. He reportedly hated watching the scene so much that he decided to never watch his films again.
21.
Pierce Brosnan similarly said he cringed when he heard his singing in Mamma Mia. “There is certainly a sense of cringe-making when it comes to singing,” he said. “You’re very vulnerable. … Singing is not necessarily my forte — I enjoy singing, I’m not quite sure other people enjoy my singing, but they have good entertainment value out of my singing.”
22.
This one didn’t involve any singing, but Pierce Brosnan’s performance as James Bond was also pretty poorly received. It wasn’t only fans who disliked his performance; Brosnan himself said he was “caught somewhere in between the Roger Moore and the Sean Connery of it all. And both men, I adored as James Bond. But it never felt — I don’t know — real.”
“I felt like I was in a period-piece sometimes,” Brosnan continued. “Because I could hear echoes or sensations of Connery or of Roger, which I didn’t try to censor; I’d just allow them to come in.” He also told the Telegraph, “I have no desire to watch myself as James Bond. ‘Cause it’s just never good enough. It’s a horrible feeling.”
23.
Sometimes, an actor is critical of a role even if they received acclaim for it. Meryl Streep, for instance, was critical of her Oscar-nominated performance as Sarah and Anna in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. “I was young and new at this,” Meryl said on The Graham Norton Show. “I wasn’t as pleased as I could…I didn’t feel like I was living it.”
25.
When Brad Pitt starred in12 Monkeys, he said he “nailed” the first half of the film, but felt he got the second half wrong. “That performance bothered me because there was a trap in the writing,” he said. “It’s not the writing’s fault, but it was something that I couldn’t figure out. I knew in the second half of the film, I was playing the gimmick of what was real in the first half — until the last scene — and it bugged the [expletive] out of me.” Still, he ended up winning a Golden Globe for his performance.
26.
Christian Bale is a fan-favorite Batman, but he wasn’t thrilled with his own performance. He told Yahoo, “I didn’t quite manage what I hoped I would throughout the trilogy … My own sense of self is like, ‘I didn’t quite nail it.’ … Heath [Ledger] turned up and just kind of completely ruined all my plans. Because I went, ‘He’s so much more interesting than me and what I’m doing.'”
27.
Batman & Robin, in contrast, was an infamously bad Batman film, and star George Clooney has taken plenty of the blame for that. Clooney has admitted that he was “terrible in it,” calling it a terrible film and pointing out some of the cheesier lines. “The truth of the matter is, I was bad in it,” he later said. “Akiva Goldsman — who’s won the Oscar for writing since then — he wrote the screenplay. And it’s a terrible screenplay, he’ll tell you. I’m terrible in it, I’ll tell you. Joel Schumacher, who just passed away, directed it, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, it didn’t work.’ We all whiffed on that one.”
“Batman is still the biggest break I ever had and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it,” he also said. “It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently. But if I am going to be Batman in the film Batman & Robin, I can’t say it didn’t work and then not take some of the blame for that.”
28.
Oftentimes, it’s early roles that actors are embarrassed over. Jennifer Aniston cringed while watching herself in her first big movie role in Leprechaun. Describing the time Justin Theroux made her rewatch the film, Jennifer said, “It was one of those things when I tried to get that remote out of his hand, and there was just no having it. He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, this is happening.’ I just kept walking in and out, cringing.”
29.
During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Charlie Hunnam also visibly cringed during a clip of his first acting role in Byker Grove, calling it humiliating to show before it even began.
30.
And Jake Gyllenhaal similarly covered his face as a clip from his old role in City Slickers was shown on Good Morning America.
31.
Anya Taylor-Joy is a household name now, but she was just starting out when she appeared in The Witch. She later said she was “devastated” by the performance in the film. “I thought I’d never work again; I still get shivers thinking about it. It was just the worst feeling of, ‘I have let down the people I love most in the world. I didn’t do it right,'” she said.
32.
Megan Fox’s first big movie break was Transformers. While she said the movie itself wasn’t bad, she said she was “terrible” in it. “It’s my first real movie, and it’s not honest and not realistic. The movie wasn’t bad; I just wasn’t proud about what I did,” she said. She stated audiences had only seen about “7%” of her acting range, and that she “tried” to showcase more in the second film. However, “Unless you’re a seasoned veteran, working with Michael Bay is not about an acting experience,” she said.
33.
She also cringed while watching a scene from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. “I’m glad you didn’t make me watch the dialogue scenes,” Megan said in an Entertainment Tonight interview, calling it a “shame” that her old roles “survived long enough to see the dawn of the internet … It would be nice if it had eclipsed, like the internet was born but these things had sort of fallen away and no one could find them.”
34.
Other times, it’s sequels that bring actors trouble. Will Smith is well known for appearing in the Men in Black series, but as it turns out, he wasn’t a fan of his work on the sequels. Speaking to Jimmy Fallon about Bad Boys for Life, Will said he “fumbled” a few prior sequels, in particular the Men in Black sequel. He didn’t state which he was referring to, so it could’ve been either Men in Black II or III.
35.
Daniel Radcliffe’s most famous role is as Harry in the Harry Potter films. However, he’s admitted that he wasn’t a fan of everything he did: “Mistakes other actors get to make in rehearsal rooms or at drama school are all on film for everyone to see.” He stated that he was particularly unhappy with his acting in the sixth film: “I’m just not very good in it. I hate it. My acting is very one-note, and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn’t come across.”
36.
We talked earlier about Brad Pitt being unhappy with some of his performance in 12 Monkeys. In the same interview, Brad described being contractually obligated to make Troy, saying it wasn’t “painful” but wasn’t made the way he would have liked. He admitted that he “made [his] own mistakes in it” as well, suggesting he was unhappy with his performance.
37.
Colin Farrell starred in Miami Vice in 2006. Like Pitt, Colin had more of an issue with the film than his acting in it, but he still felt his acting left something to be desired: “I didn’t like it so much — I thought it was style over substance, and I accept a good bit of the responsibility.”
38.
But some films are unsavable. Back in 2010, Sam Worthington starred in Clash of the Titans. The film received a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Worthington said of his performance, “I think I can fucking act better, to be honest.” He promised to be better in the sequel, Wrath of the Titans — however, it was also panned and currently has a 26% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes. TBH, Sam, I think these movies were just bad.
39.
And finally, Josh Brolin said that he thought he could’ve been better in Deadpool 2, and he wants to “redeem [himself] to [himself]” in future films where he’s playing the part, as he found a lot of the rhythm of the character’s banter with Deadpool during the press tour after the movie was filmed.
Which one surprised you the most? Let us know in the comments below!
