Dakota Johnson and the actors who famously hated their own films
After a much-mocked trailer and a suspicious dearth of press previews, it seems likely that Madame Web is the latest Spider-Man spin-off to go down the spout. Reviews of the film almost universally conclude that it’s even worse than Morbius. Alas, no rearguard action is being fought by its star, Dakota Johnson. While she hasn’t come out to openly criticise the end result, industry eyebrows were certainly raised when she left her talent agency, WME, a mere week after that trailer dropped.
Her press tour is an excruciating game of reading between the lines. And that’s barely even necessary. Asked about the process of making a heavily blue-screened effects blockbuster for the first time, Johnson could barely conceal her lack of enthusiasm.
“I’ve never really done a movie where you are on a blue screen, and there’s fake explosions going off, and someone’s going, ‘Explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion. That to me was absolutely psychotic. I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good at all! I hope that I did an okay job!’”
If you can’t play the game of promoting your own film convincingly even before it comes out, it seems less than probable that you will think back fondly on your decision to star. Many other actors – more commonly after the fact – have weighed in against the films they either really hated making, or hated watching. Here are some of the most infamous.
Jamie Dornan – Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
The Fifty Shades films made a tidy profit – especially the first one, the only one that’s a non-awful movie. Dakota Johnson herself has explained that “no one would have done it” if they’d known how “psychotic” the clashes with EL James in production would be.
But at least she was kindly treated in the reviews. It was Dornan who took the brunt. Without going so far as to say he regrets the career break they represented, he saw it all coming, as he recently told Desert Island Discs. “I think I hid,” he admitted. “I am coming off the back of career-altering reviews for The Fall to just ridicule, almost.” He and his wife holed up at the country house of Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
“[Then] it made so much money that two or three were like greenlit overnight. [...] I’m now contractually doing two more of them and knowing that there would be more of that damnation to come.”
Much of Dornan’s more recent work in the likes of Belfast has been glowingly received, but the spectre of Christian Grey still haunts him constantly. “A lot of reviews are like, ‘He’s great, but lest we forget when he wasn’t great…’”
Christopher Plummer – The Sound of Music (1965)
If there’s one thing Christopher Plummer had over 50 years to make clear, it’s that he really didn’t like The Sound of Music. “Sentimental and gooey” were his typical objections to the evergreen classic, which he liked to deride as “S&M” or even “The Sound of Mucus”. He confessed in a 2010 interview that trying to make Captain von Trapp interesting was like “flogging a dead horse”.
The entire cast of Cats – Cats (2019)
Tom Hooper’s star-studded, big-budget, all-time disaster of an Andrew Lloyd Webber adaptation was universally panned by critics (this newspaper argued that “the only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it”) and derided by viewers.
Cue the majority of its A-list cast quietly distancing themselves from the film. Rebel Wilson mocked it in her Baftas speech, saying she was recycling her black dress from “a funeral I just went to for the feature film Cats.” Taylor Swift called it a “weird-ass movie” and James Corden and Judi Dench have both said they’ve heard it’s terrible, while claiming not to have seen it.
Dench was especially disparaging about her costume, which she said made her look “like a battered, mangy old cat… The cloak I was made to wear! Like five foxes f----- on my back.”
Daniel Craig – Spectre (2015) (and Bond generally)
Amid all the hoopla about which lucky actor gets to play 007 next, the likes of Tom Hardy should probably be warned that the role’s no cakewalk. Sean Connery famously hated Bond – “I’d like to kill him?”, he would say – and feuded for decades with Cubby Broccoli over pay disputes, which explain why he kept quitting the series.
But Daniel Craig has been even more outspoken about the routine arduousness of getting one of the films in the can. Two days after wrapping production on Spectre in 2015, he gave a notorious interview to Time Out London saying he’d “rather slash his wrists” than do another one.
These are never tightly efficient shoots, but chaotic races against time, with script polishes and/or third-act repairs demanded at a harrowingly late stage. For all this, maybe Craig is just a canny negotiator who knows which side his bread is buttered on: his ￡37 million fee for Spectre was upped to a reported ￡50 million when they lured him back for No Time to Die.
Elizabeth Taylor – Butterfield 8 (1961)
“It stinks!”, Elizabeth Taylor is said to have screamed, throwing her shoes at the screen when she first saw this drama about a high-price call-girl. She had never wanted to do it in the first place, telling MGM production chief Sol Siegel, “This is the most pornographic script I have ever read. I’ve been here for 17 years and I was never asked to play such a horrible role as Gloria Wandrous. She’s a sick nymphomaniac. I won’t do it for anything.”
Unfortunately, MGM held her over a barrel with a musty age-old contract, forcing her to make this for $125,000 before her $1 million payday for Fox’s Cleopatra (1963). John O’Hara’s novel was duly transformed into a trash-fest, sleazily capitalising on Taylor’s scandalous image for seducing her married co-star, Eddie Fisher, away from Debbie Reynolds.
“I was the slut of all time!” is the line summing up her character best. The consolation prize was winning Best Actress after three Oscar defeats – a victory usually chalked up to sympathy, during Taylor’s recovery from pneumonia and a tracheotomy.
Channing Tatum – GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra (2009)
The film adaptation of the popular US comic series did OK at the global box office, earning $302 million, but no amount of money could convince Tatum that he hadn’t made a mistake by starring in it.
Tatum claims he only took the role after being prodded into it by Paramount, with whom he had signed a three-film contract earlier in his career. “I f------ hate that movie,” he said in a radio interview, adding that “the script wasn’t any good”.
Alec Guinness – Star Wars (1977)
What was it that caused Alec Guinness to have such a rough time working on his Oscar-nominated role in the modern era’s best-loved blockbuster? The answer’s simple: George Lucas’s script.
“New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wodges of pink paper – and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable,” he wrote from the set to a friend. In the same letter he refers uncertainly to “Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford” and admits the money, doubled in negotiations, was the one thing keeping him going.
He wasn’t the only cast member to doubt Lucas’s writing abilities – “George, you can type this s---, but you can’t say it!” Harrison Ford famously quipped, while Carrie Fisher found her exposition so unspeakable it perversely inspired her to become a screenwriter.
Ryan Reynolds – Green Lantern (2011)
Ryan Reynolds dealt admirably with starring in what is often called the worst superhero film ever made: by making it a running gag in another one, Deadpool, several years later. He tried to squirm out of criticism by arguing that it was his character, Hal Jordan, who was the source of most of the scorn. “Look, I’ve never seen the full final version of Green Lantern. I saw a very late-stage rough cut of the film.”
George Clooney – Batman and Robin (1997)
Even now, George Clooney makes a point of “always apologising for Batman and Robin”, which he thought was so terrible it had killed off the franchise (until it was revived by Christopher Nolan a few years later). The saddest part? He genuinely thought it was a good idea: “I thought at the time that this was going to be a very good career move. Um, it wasn’t.”
Harrison Ford – Blade Runner (1982)
Rick Deckard in Blade Runner is a grumbling cynic slogging through a what-fresh-hell assignment in thoroughly inhospitable surroundings. Harrison Ford didn’t so much sink into character as live all of the above for months. “It was a long slog,” he told Vanity Fair in 2017. Ridley Scott had just lost his 45-year-old brother Frank to skin cancer, and was having to placate hordes of meddling studio cronies. His lowering mood infected the atmosphere on the Warner Bros backlot – all smoke and boiling noodles, as they shot night after night.
“In a way, it’s a benevolent dictatorship,” Scott likes to say of his non-collaborative directing style. But Ford and he were at loggerheads about whether Deckard is really a replicant, a notion Ford despised, which Scott kept trying to plant in the story. Ford exploded when that origami unicorn crept in as a clue. “Goddamn it, I thought we said I wasn’t a replicant!” Growling through a voice-over he considered “awkward and uninspired” set the tone for post-production, and the film’s box office fortunes were equally depressing.
Halle Berry – Catwoman (2004)
The DC Universe gave a rotten short straw to Halle Berry. Three years after collecting her Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, she scored a Razzie for her efforts in the famously atrocious Catwoman. It was her biggest pay-cheque and biggest humiliation, but she endured it like a champ. She gamely turned up to the awards ceremony for the year’s worst films, thanking Warner Bros “for casting me in this piece-of-s---, god-awful movie”.
Emilia Clarke – Terminator Genisys (2015)
After this overblown attempt to reboot Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killbot franchise failed to break even in 2015, plans for a sequel and a TV spin-off were put on ice. Even if a sequel had been made, Clarke probably wouldn’t have been saying “I’ll be back.” In an interview with Vanity Fair, she admitted she was “relieved” the franchise fizzled out.
A troubled production had taken its toll on the film’s director, Alan Taylor, who had previously worked with Clarke on Game of Thrones. According to the actress, Taylor got “eaten and chewed up on Terminator. He was not the director I remembered. He didn’t have a good time. No one had a good time.”
Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer – Grease II (1982)
The millions of fans who were hopelessly devoted to Grease weren’t the only ones left disappointed by its lacklustre sequel. Main stars Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer were also distinctly underwhelmed – to put it lightly. While Pfeiffer went on to triumph, unlike Halle Berry, playing Catwoman, she was no Olivia Newton-John: “I hated that film with a vengeance and could not believe how bad it was,” she said in 2007.
But while Pfeiffer struggled to spring back after the flop – Brian De Palma initially refused to let her audition for Scarface (1983) – Caulfield had it much worse. “I learnt a pretty harsh lesson early on. After Grease 2, the films I’d been promised never materialised.”
“Michelle was smart. Right afterwards she did Scarface with Al Pacino. That showed that she had range, that she was versatile. Me? Well, I was stuck for a while with a reputation as a bubblegum actor.”
Wesley Snipes – Blade: Trinity (2004)
If ever the third time was not the charm, it was during the dud finale to Wesley Snipes’s vampire superhero saga, which might have continued if he hadn’t hated it so much. “Bad ingredients going in, bad cake coming out,” Snipes summed up in 2014.
David S. Goyer had written the first two screenplays, but their relationship collapsed here, with Snipes complaining that his white co-stars, Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel, were dragging the emphasis away from him.
According to supporting player Patton Oswalt, Snipes would “smoke weed all day” and seemed permanently on edge. At one point, he supposedly tried to choke Goyer – though Snipes denies this. The next day, a posse of bikers showed up on set – Goyer had met them at a strip bar overnight, and bribed them to pose as his security. Snipes, it is said, freaked out and retreated to his trailer. By the end of the shoot, he was communicating only using Post-it notes signed “from Blade”.
Robert Pattinson – The (entire) Twilight Saga (2008-2012)
While Pattinson won the attention of teenage Harry Potter fans after playing the doomed Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it was landing the main part in the blockbusting Twilight Saga films that made him a Hollywood star.
As tragic vampire Edward, Pattinson gained some considerable body shimmer for the role, several million dollars, and a girlfriend in co-star Kristen Stewart (they later split after she had an affair with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders), but he never became a Twi-hard in the process.
“When I read it, it seems like a book that wasn’t supposed to be published,” he said of the series, which would go on to inspire other great works… such as Fifty Shades of Grey.
Matt Damon – The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
The Bourne Ultimatum went on to win three Oscars and give Matt Damon his biggest earner at the time, but that doesn’t mean he liked the third film in the action trilogy. Damon, who, let’s not forget, wrote the Oscar-winning script for Good Will Hunting while he was still a student, took umbrage with scriptwriter Tony Gilroy.
“I don’t blame Tony for taking a boatload of money and handing in what he handed in,” Damon told GQ. “It’s just that it was unreadable. This is a career-ender. I mean, I could put this thing up on eBay and it would be game over for that dude. It’s really embarrassing. He was having a go, basically, and he took his money and left.”
Ben Affleck – Daredevil (2003) and Batman vs Superman (2016)
Ben Affleck also won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting, but that seemed a long way away in 2003, when he was best known for getting prematurely engaged to Jennifer Lopez, appearing in the video for her hit song Jenny From the Block, and making Gigli. He also starred in the now-little-loved Daredevil.
Affleck despised the superhero film so much that it spurred him on to try and redeem himself, by playing DC’s caped crusader in Zack Snyder’s Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). On that press tour, he admitted his motivation: “I wanted for once to get one of these movies and do it right – to do a good version. I hate Daredevil so much.”
This noble career goal backfired, unfortunately. When the embargo broke on Snyder’s film to a worldwide critical drubbing, and someone revealed as much in a junket interview, Henry Cavill went round in circles doing damage limitation, while Affleck just sat next to him, dying inside. The above slow zoom edit of this moment labelled “Sad Affleck”, to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, quickly went viral.
Sylvester Stallone – Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018)
Perhaps he should have feared the potential nominative determinism of Escape Plan 2’s subtitle, but Stallone certainly seems to have been put through hell for the middle film of this prison action trilogy.
“Escape Plan 2 WAS TRULY THE MOST HORRIBLY PRODUCED FILM I have ever had the misfortune to be in,” Stallone wrote on his Instagram account, as a means to promote Escape Plan 3: The Extractors (2019), which was (apparently) a comparative breeze to make.
Kate Winslet – Titanic (1997)
It would spiral wildly over budget, petrify the studio executives and wind up as a record-breaking box office phenomenon. But the day-to-day process of making Titanic, for a then-21-year-old Kate Winslet, was simply torture. She told Rolling Stone that James Cameron used to dub her “Kate Weighs-a-Lot”, prompting unhappy memories of nicknames she was given in school.
Conditions, as the production ran on and on, were gruelling: 20-hour days were sometimes mandated, and a majority of scenes were shot at night, meaning 4am breakfasts and wild disorientation. For all the scenes when she was swimming, Winslet was one of the few actors who wore no wetsuit, out of a concern it might show through the chiffon. “It was like swimming in the coldest winter in the history of Scottish winters,” she later remembered. “No acting was required because my reactions were real.”
No wonder she came down with pneumonia – almost causing her to quit. She also nearly drowned when her coat got snagged underwater. These days, she hates watching herself in it, wishing for a redo on every scene – but maybe without the ordeal.
Daniel Radcliffe – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
Signing on for eight films when you’re barely over eight years old is one of the more risky strategies for adolescence. So it’s hardly surprising that Daniel Radcliffe found the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a little difficult to reminisce about: “I’m just not very good in it,” he said during an interview. “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.”
Matthew Goode – Leap Year (2010)
Goode took a pragmatic approach to the sappy rom-com Leap Year. He told The Telegraph: “I just know that there are a lot of people who will say it is the worst film of 2010”, but explained that the film’s appeal lay in its convenience as a job, rather than its artistry: “That was the main reason I took it, so that I could come home at the weekends.
“It wasn’t because of the script, trust me. I was told it was going to be like The Quiet Man with a Vaughan Williams soundtrack, but in the end it turned out to have pop music all over it. A bit like Chasing Liberty again. Do I feel I let myself down? No. Was it a bad job? Yes, it was. But, you know, I had a nice time and I got paid.”
Sylvester Stallone – Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)
Stallone and Estelle Getty took on this shambles of a buddy cop film in 1992, only after Arnold Schwarzenegger (who had been sent the woeful script) pretended to be interested purely to lure in the Rocky star. Stallone has made a habit of taking it down in increasingly imaginative ways ever since, including, in 2010: “If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.”
Jamie Lee Curtis – Virus (1999)
Nearly 20 years after its release, preposterous alien invasion movie Virus has achieved cult status, but star Jamie Lee Curtis, now an Oscar-winner, remains unconvinced. She told Wenn in 2010 that she regrets making the “piece of s--- movie”, deriding it as “an unbelievably bad movie, just bad from the bottom. There’s a scene where I’m running away from this alien and I actually hide under the stairs. This is something that can open walls of steel and I’m hiding under stairs!”
Much like a virus, there appeared to be no cure for the film – Curtis just had to ride it out: “It was maybe the only time I’ve known something was just bad and there was nothing I could do about it.”
Nicole Kidman – Australia (2008)
Kidman is famed for not watching the films she appears in, but she did see Baz Luhrmann’s lavish flop Australia, and she wasn’t happy. She told a Sydney radio station: “I can’t look at this movie and be proud of what I’ve done… It’s just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally.”
Katherine Heigl – Knocked Up (2007)
Judd Apatow’s goofy pregnancy comedy triumphed at the box office and got good reviews, but Katherine Heigl found the film’s gender politics difficult to swallow. Heigl, who was moved to stress that being on Apatow’s set was the “best filming experience of her career”, did gripe to Vanity Fair that she also found Knocked Up “a little sexist”.
She continued: “It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch. Why is she being such a killjoy?”
Mickey Rourke – Passion Play (2010)
Rourke had just come agonisingly close to a Best Actor Oscar for his career-best turn in The Wrestler (2009). But the pendulum swung back to wretchedness when his 2010 drama Passion Play dive-bombed. Rourke played a former heroin-addict-cum-jazz-trumpeter who falls in love with a woman who has real wings (Megan Fox); he called it “Terrible. Another terrible movie.”
But he added: “You know, in your career and [with] all the movies you make, you’re going to make dozens of terrible ones.” When he was told the film was getting a limited release, he quite understood, replying: “That’s because it’s not very good.”
Megan Fox – Transformers (2007)
Even more unfortunately for Fox, she’d already been the poster girl for Michael Bay’s wildly lucrative Transformers – lasciviously treated by the cameras throughout, even though she wasn’t such a fan of her own performance.
“I’m terrible in it,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2009, before parting ways with the franchise. “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… But unless you’re a seasoned veteran, working with Michael Bay is not about an acting experience.”
