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- Twilight
- Summit Entertainment
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Robert Pattinson wouldn't be playing Bruce Wayne in Matt Reeves's forthcoming The Batman if it weren't for the franchise that launched him into the mainstream: Twilight. Playing teenage vampire Edward Cullen in the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer's books was apparently very difficult for Pattinson, who hated the role so much, he was almost fired for being too morose.
Pattinson stopped bathing, refused to smile, and amplified his character's emo attitude to the point that his agent had to intervene. Pattinson told Howard Stern his agent visited him on set and told him, "You have to do the opposite of what you're doing now or you're going to get fired today." Fortunately, Pattison changed his tune enough to remain on board, but he continues to badmouth the Twilight movies every chance he gets, calling it "nuts," saying it "doesn't make sense" and asserting he'd "mindlessly hate it" even if he wasn't in it!
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- A New Hope
- 20th Century Fox
"He’s dumb as a stump," Harrison Ford shared in 2009 about one of his most iconic characters: Millenium Falcon captain Han Solo. When pressed about Solo's status as a cultural institution, Ford cast serious shade on Star Wars fans, saying, "At no credit to the culture for embracing him as a hero."
This isn't the only time Ford has declared his disdain for the character. He told MTV in 2010:
No, no, no. Han Solo was very good to me at a certain point in my career. But I’m done. I’m done with him.
When the J.J. Abrams sequel trilogy was in the works, George Lucas met with Ford personally to convince the actor to pick up a blaster pistol again. Whether due to the hefty paycheck or a change in perspective, Ford obviously agreed and returned for 2015's The Force Awakens and 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.
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Kristen Stewart carries a lot of regret about the years of her life that were consumed by the Twilight movies, especially as it relates to her high-profile romantic relationship with Robert Pattinson. "I hated it that details of my life were being turned into a commodity and peddled around the world," she shared in an interview. "When I was dating Rob, the public were the enemy - and that is no way to live," she further clarified.
Playing Bella Swan taught Stewart a lot about Hollywood, and in 2015, she shared some salient advice with Daisy Ridley, who became an overnight sensation playing Rey in the Star Wars sequels. "It's literally mainly just about focusing on what makes you happy. And if losing your anonymity or whatever doesn't make you happy, then focus on something else," Stewart explained.
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Now a nonagenarian, Canadian actor Christopher Plummer has been a star of stage and screen since the 1950s. To further his prospects, Plummer agreed to play the widowed Captain Georg von Trapp in the 1965 film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical, The Sound of Music. The celebrated story of a young, whimsical nun named Maria who becomes the caretaker for von Trapp's seven children also defined the career of Plummer's co-star, Julie Andrews.
Looking back on his career in 2011, Plummer cited The Sound of Music as the film he resents the most. "It was so awful and sentimental and gooey," he explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "You had to work terribly hard to try and infuse some minuscule bit of humor into it."
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Crispin Glover hates the ending of 1985's Back to the Future, and he continues to speak out against the film's producer and co-writer Bob Gale:
Me asking the questions that I asked [about the film’s ending] infuriated [the filmmakers], and they were angry and they wanted to do something that was cruel, which they accomplished. Bob Gale then specifically lied and said false things about me.
Why does the actor who played Marty's dad George McFly detest the movie so much? Glover thinks its message that money buys happiness is problematic. When the McFlys are poor, they are miserable; but, when Marty changes the past and his parents come into money, their present becomes much less gloomy.
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Despite her talent, Jessica Alba's filmography suffers from one bad feature after another, but none as bad as Tim Story's Fantastic Four movies from the '00s. According to Alba, the often-derided Marvel flicks don't work because of Story's approach to directing. Instead of respecting Alba's acting instincts, Story constrained them:
He was like, "Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in." And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough?
The experience traumatized Alba so much, it forever tainted her views about acting. "And so I just said, 'F*ck it. I don't care about this business anymore," she later shared.
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Shia LaBeouf is no stranger to speaking his mind, but the controversial actor also recognizes how being cast as Sam Witwicky in Michael Bay's Transformers earned him a golden ticket in Hollywood. "Michael and [producer] Steven Spielberg did a lot for me. I’m not going to pooh-pooh those dudes anymore," LaBeouf told Esquire in 2018. That doesn't mean LaBeouf isn't honest about how he sees the films. He explained:
My hang-up with those films was that they felt irrelevant. You come up on these stories about Easy Rider and Raging Bull and De Niro and Scorsese and Hopper, and you find value in what they do. Meanwhile, you’re chasing energon crystals. It’s very hard to keep doing what you’re doing when you feel like it’s the antithesis of your purpose on this planet.
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- The Rise of Skywalker
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
"I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race," John Boyega recently shared with GQ about his time playing Finn in the Star Wars sequels. "Nobody else in the cast had people saying they were going to boycott the movie because [they were in it]. Nobody else had the uproar and death threats sent to their Instagram DMs and social media, saying, 'Black this and black that and you shouldn’t be a Stormtrooper.'"
According to Boyega, he was expected to ignore the enduring, traumatic racism aimed at him both by fans and people working in the movie industry. "So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, 'I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...' Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it's a great experience."
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Considered one of the worst sequels of all time, the campy Grease 2 flopped when it was released in 1982. It did, however, help Michelle Pfeiffer jumpstart her professional acting career. Pfeiffer, who starred alongside Al Pacino in Scarface the year after, auditioned for Grease 2 on a whim:
I went on a lark. My agent said, "Oh, just go." I wasn’t a dancer, I wasn’t a singer. And I was in this short purple skirt with go-go boots and we had the dancing auditions.
While most moviegoers have nothing good to say about Grease 2, many do concede that Pfeiffer is the highlight of the lackluster sing-a-long.
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The late Scottish actor Sean Connery is most often associated with playing British spy James Bond in quite a few of the franchise's films, from 1962's Dr. No to 1983's Never Say Never Again. The infamously brash and reactionary actor is known for saying all sorts of derisive things, so it's no surprise he sustained complicated opinions about Bond over the years. He once said, "I have always hated that damned James Bond. I'd like to kill him."
Even though he is forever indebted to the role, Connery always viewed James Bond as a dark and ultimately unlikable antihero.
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In his early days, Channing Tatum accepted whatever roles helped him establish himself in Hollywood. Now that he's an A-lister, Tatum gets real about how much he despises one film in particular: G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra. He related:
I hate that movie. I was pushed into doing that movie. [After] Coach Carter, they signed me for a three-picture deal... And as a young [actor], you’re like, "Oh my god, that sounds amazing, I’m doing that!"
Contractually obligated, Tatum agreed to play the lead, Duke, alongside Marlon Wayans. He even returned for 2013's G.I. Joe: Retaliation co-starring the Rock - likely due to the first film's financial success in theaters.
Oscar winner Viola Davis maintains one major regret so far from her expansive career: playing domestic worker Aibileen Clark in the 2011 cinematic adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help. Davis doesn't have anything bad to say about her co-stars or anyone else involved in making The Help. Instead, Davis thinks The Help fails to center the voices of the Black women in this story set in 1960s Mississippi. As she told Vanity Fair:
I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.
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Even though Megan Fox claims to have settled her long-standing feud with Transformers director Michael Bay, it's hard to ignore the severe statements Fox made about Bay in the wake of making Transformers:
He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is, so he's a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he's not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he's so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all... He's vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he's a tyrant.
These days, Fox is working on keeping her on-set problems private. "As I got a little older, I understood regardless of whatever my issues were, they should always have remained private. You should never blast someone like that in public."
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No one hates High School Musical as much as its star, Zac Efron. Now that he's played everyone from Jason Kelly in Dirty Grandpa to Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Efron doesn't mind coming clean about how he views his High School Musical character Troy Bolton.
"I step back and look at myself and I still want to kick that guy’s a** sometimes," Efron told Men's Fitness. Efron has "nothing but love for the High School Musical cast and fans," but he does whatever he can to avoid the movies and any of the merchandise associated with them - mostly because he views the fame that came along with the films as totally fake. "You can’t enjoy or celebrate it, it’s not a real thing," he said.
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Mark Wahlberg received untold critical praise for playing adult film actor Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 ensemble drama Boogie Nights. Thanks to Anderson's movie, Wahlberg's career opened up to all kinds of dramatic roles, from playing Sean Dignam in Martin Scorsese's The Departed to Micky Ward in David O. Russell's The Fighter.
That being said, Wahlberg regrets playing Diggler in retrospect. The reason? His Christian beliefs. "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," he shared with People in 2017. "The idea of having to explain that movie and the reason behind it to my kids is another issue."
