Please Enjoy This List of Actors Insulting Their Own Movies
Every actor hates himself a little for their career missteps—except Bill Murray. Bill Murray is too perfect for mistakes.
All actors have taken movie roles they wish to bury like embarrassing middle school yearbooks.
With major movie studios boycotting ingenuity and flooding 2019 with more remakes and reboots than ever before, actors were looking over their resumes in trepidation that their most regrettable roles will be brought into the limelight again. Their reasons span from not reading the script beforehand to being too drunk to film, but every actor hates himself a little for their career missteps.
Here are seven actors who've insulted their own movies:
1. Jackie Chan - Rush Hour (1998)
When Jackie Chan first saw the script for Rush Hour, he said, "No, I don't like it." After he saw the film, he told his manager, "Terrible movie. They don't allow me to do my own style. The English, I'm not good. Chris Tucker's English, I don't understand. Terrible movie!"
At the time, he was still trying to break into American cinema, believing, "Nobody knows who this little Chinese guy is, he speaks no English," as he told Yahoo's Role Recall. Now, as a bona fide action movie icon, Jackie Chan just wants to know when Rush Hour 4 is going to happen.
2. Sally Field - The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
The Amazing Spider-Man films of 2012 and 2014 (prior to the fan favorite cinnamon roll, Tom Holland) are testaments to why you should never do people favors. Sally Field, who played Peter Parker's Aunt May, told Howard Stern that she only accepted the role as a favor to her friend and the film's producer, Laura Ziskin.
Field said, "It's really hard to find a three-dimensional character in it, and you work it as much as you can, but you can't put ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag."
3. Bill Murray - Garfield (2004)
To be clear, Bill Murray doesn't hate Garfield, the beloved comic strip character; he hated being in Garfield, the 2004 bomb and Golden Schmoes contender for "Worst Movie of the Year" (and he was in the sequel). As he told The Today Show, "I did the Garfield movies, which were just like one crazier than the next... And I didn't really read the script." Murray only saw the script was written by Joel Cohen and assumed it was one of the acclaimed Coen brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowski).
He recalls, "I'm looking, I go Joel Coen, one of my favorites, I mean the Coen brothers? These guys make great movies. Well, it wasn't that Joel Coen, it was a different Joel Cohen." Rather than modern classics like No Country for Old Men and True Grit, Joel Cohen wrote Cheaper by the Dozen, which is a movie that exists because Steve Martin was bored in 2003.
4. Jared Leto - Suicide Squad (2016)
One thing we all have in common with Jared Leto is that we hate his version of the Joker in Suicide Squad. But while we wished his portrayal as a meth-head Ronald McDonald had less screen time, he thought there should've been more.
When Variety asked if Leto was disappointed that many of his scenes were cut from the film, he snapped back, "Were there any that didn't get cut? I'm asking you, were there any that didn't get cut? There were so many scenes that got cut from the movie, I couldn't even start. I think that the Joker… we did a lot of experimentation on the set, we explored a lot. There's so much that we shot that's not in the film."
Many secondhand reports say Leto vented that he felt "tricked into being a part of something that had been pitched to him very differently." When it comes to Warner Bros., his stance is clear: "F*ck 'em."
5. Michelle Pfeiffer - Grease 2 (1978)
Apparently, Grease was given a sequel, starring Michelle Pfeiffer and who knows who else. While Grease 2 was critically panned at the time, the A-list actress is harsher than her critics were: "I hated that film with a vengeance and could not believe how bad it was. At the time I was young and didn't know any better."
She added, "I hear it's a cult movie now." Indeed, according to the still active Grease 2 "ultimate fansite" and Twitter account, Pfeiffer's terrible movie is "the coolest movie musical ever."
6. Mark Wahlberg - Boogie Nights (1997)
Twenty years after the film's release, Wahlberg bowed to his Catholic upbringing when he appeared at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago alongside Cardinal Blasé Cupic, commenting, "I just always hope that God is a movie fan and also forgiving, because I've made some poor choices in my past. 'Boogie Nights' is up there at the top of the list."
Later on, Wahlberg tried to pull back from the statement, telling People, "I was sitting in front of a couple of thousand kids talking about and trying to encourage them to come back to their faith…" But considering Boogie Nights launched Marky Mark's film career, such a blanket dismissal takes balls.
7. Daniel Radcliffe - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
It turns out Harry Potter was often wasted. Daniel Radcliffe has been open about abusing alcohol to cope with the pressures of fame and carrying the $25 billion franchise. While he swears he never drank on set, he admits to filming while very much inebriated: "I can point to many scenes where I'm just gone. Dead behind the eyes."
Now that he's overcome the self-destructive habit and we know that Harry Potter is well and good, one of the best reasons to rewatch all of the series' films is to try to detect which drunken scenes Radcliffe doesn't want to identify. He's given a few clues, though, saying in a separate interview, "And that's why it's hard to watch a film like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Because 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."