“What are your biggest regrets?” This might be one of the more obvious questions a journalist can ask an actor, but the answer can often be hugely revealing.
Many actors have spoken negatively about their time spent as a superhero, playing a teenage heartthrob or starring in films they believed had been written by somebody else (see: Bill Murray).
Others, including Charlize Theron, have said they took a job solely due to a director’s filmography – only to then be let down by the final results of their collaboration.
Below, The Independent looks at 23 actors who admitted to disliking films they have starred in.
READ MORE: 25 brilliant films that bombed at the box office
George Clooney – Batman & Robin (1997)
Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck – some of Hollywood’s best-known actors have played the Caped Crusader on screen. However, only one wore a suit with Batnipples – and that was George Clooney. “Let me just say that I’d actually thought I’d destroyed the franchise until somebody else brought it back years later and changed it,” he once said of the role. “I thought at the time that this was going to be a very good career move. It wasn’t.”
Halle Berry – Catwoman (2004)
Halle Berry remains one of the few actors to accept her Razzie award in person. “Thank you so much. I never in my life thought I would be up here,” she told the audience, before spoofing her own Oscar acceptance speech and thanking her manager. “He loves me so much that he convinces me to do projects even when he knows that it is s***.” She recently said she has been “carrying the weight” of the film’s failure, telling Jimmy Kimmel: “Whatever success it had or didn’t have somehow seemed like it was all my fault. But it really wasn’t my fault.”
Ben Affleck – Daredevil (2003)
If you hate Daredevil, Ben Affleck hates it more. “Daredevil didn’t work at all”, the actor told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. “If I wanted to go viral, I would be less polite.” He’d give the superhero genre another go, accepting the role of Bruce Wayne for Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman, with better, if underwhelming, results.
Brad Pitt – The Devil’s Own (1997)
There are many films Brad Pitt could arguably regret making (the awful 1992 flick Cool World comes to mind), but speaking to Newsweek in 1997, the actor named his personal worst: The Devil’s Own. He called the Alan J Pakula film a “disaster” and “the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking, if you can even call it that, that I’ve ever seen”.
Jessica Alba – Fantastic Four (2005)
While superhero movies may now be Oscar Best Picture contenders (Black Panther), there was a time when playing a spandex-wearing hero was anything but prestigious. Jessica Alba was one of the first people to jump on the superhero boom of the mid-Noughties, playing Invisible Woman in Fantastic Four. The experience, though, left her wanting to quit acting altogether. “I hated it. I really hated,” she told Elle. “I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer. The director was like, ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica’.”
Katherine Heigl once criticised Judd Apatow’s ‘Knocked Up’
Bill Murray – Garfield: The Movie (2004)
Bill Murray only voiced animated car Garfield because of a misunderstanding: he thought Joel Coen, of the Coen brothers fame, had written the script. In fact, it was written by Joel Cohen (Cheaper by the Dozen,Monster Mash: The Movie). “I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, ‘Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with,’” he told GQ. “So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, ‘Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the f*** was Coen thinking?’ And then they explained it to me: it wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.”
Channing Tatum – GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)
“I’ll be honest, I f***ing hate that movie,” Channing Tatum said of GI Joe. “I was pushed into doing it. The script wasn’t any good. And I didn’t want to do something that I – that I was a fan of since I was a kid and watched every morning growing up – and didn’t want to do something that was, one, bad. And two, I just didn’t know if I wanted to be GI Joe.”
Channing Tatum said he was ‘pushed into’ starring in ‘GI Joe’
Charlize Theron admitted she only starred in ‘Reindeer Games’ to work with director John Frankenheimer
