For most actors, getting cast in a career-making role or opportunity is nothing short of a dream come true. Every day, people flock to Hollywood in the hopes of getting picked out of a crowd and given that one breakout role that's going to skyrocket them to stardom.
But the truth is, stardom isn't always all it's cracked up to be, and when an actor finally makes it in this business, they aren't always happy with the end result. The following is a list of actors, actresses, and multi-hyphenate personalities who hate the roles or gigs that made them famous...
You know who made $350,000 for a week’s worth of work on a 22-minute show? Angus T. Jones. He’s the guy who played Jake on CBS’s Two and a Half Men.
Near the height of the show's popularity, he had a religious epiphany and decided to renounce the television show that has made him rich and famous. He said of working on the show, “I'm on Two and a Half Men, and I don't want to be on it.” Going beyond saying he doesn’t want to be a part of the show, he implores people to “stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth. Please.”
He said all this in a video released by Forerunner Christian Church, remarking that television in general, not just his own show, “is bad news.” He refers to the medium as “deceptive,” calling it “the enemy.”
When it comes to her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars, Carrie Fisher puts it frankly in her memoir/one-woman show Wishful Drinking, saying, "George Lucas ruined my life. And I mean that in the nicest possible way... George is a visionary. He has transported audiences the world over, and he's provided Mark [Hamill] and Harrison [Ford] and myself with enough fanmail – and even a small merry band of stalkers – to keep us entertained for the rest of our unnatural lives."
Fisher hated the fact that Lucas sold merchandise with her face on it – from dolls to shampoo to Pez dispensers – and effectively turned her into a sex symbol. She hated the instantly recognizable Leia braids, which she felt made her face look too round. But most of all, Fisher hated the metal bikini from Return of the Jedi, which she felt over-sexualized her: "When I laid down, the metal bikini stayed up... So Boba Fett could see all the way to Florida."
Having made over $2 billion worldwide (and over $650 million domestic), James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic is the second-biggest blockbuster of all time (behind only Avatar). So why does the film's star, Kate Winslet, hate having portrayed Rose?
When the film was rereleased in 3D, Winslet had this to say about her performance: "Every single scene, I’m like ‘Really, really? You did it like that? Oh my God... Even my American accent, I can’t listen to it. It’s awful. 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.’”
But Winslet's performance wasn't the only thing she hated about the project. She once revealed that the film's theme song, Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," is a constant source of annoyance for her that haunts her wherever she goes. "I did a talk show recently in Italy and they actually had a live pianist who started gently playing the theme song," she says. "I was not even gently, rather severely, urged to go and sing it as though I had in fact sung it myself in the first place. It was like, 'No! I'm not going to do that.' They're like, 'Oh no, come on it will be funny.' No, it won't be funny. At all. And I'm not going to."
While Alec Guinness's career was in no way made by his portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (he previously starred in many other major films including Lawrence of Arabia, Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge on the River Kwai), Obi-Wan was nonetheless a role that re-popularized Guinness to a new generation of film-goers.
As the story goes, the classically-trained Guinness immediately regretted taking the role of Kenobi because he felt that the film's dialogue was stilted and poorly written. In fact, he hated the character so much that he was the first in line to kill off Kenobi.
As Star Wars grew more and more successful, Guinness's animosity towards the project also grew exponentially. In his autobiography, A Positively Final Appearance: A Journal, Guinness tells an anecdote about one time when a young boy approached him for an autograph. The kid told Guinness that he was a huge fan of Star Wars and had watched Episode IV: A New Hope over 100 times. Guinness agreed to give him an autograph, but only under the condition that he never watch the film again.
No, no... Christian Bale doesn't hate his portrayal of the chainsaw-wielding, embossed business-card distributing mass murderer, Patrick Bateman, in American Psycho. Nor is he displeased with his performance in Christopher Nolan's epic Batman trilogy (although George Clooney wasn't too happy with his nipple-enhanced iteration of the Dark Knight in 1997's Batman and Robin).
But Bale has openly spoken out about his distaste for participating in the much beloved 1992 cult-hit musical Newsies.
So why did Bale hate playing Jack "Cowboy" Kelly so much? As the actor tells it, his youthful desire for respect led to years of distaste for the film and the role. "At 17, you want to be taken very seriously," he explained. "You don't want to be doing a musical. Time healed those wounds. But it took a while.''
The Transformers franchise served as a breakthrough for actress Megan Fox, but she absolutely hated working with director Michael Bay, and the two feuded during production of the first two films.
Asked whether she would return for the third film, Dark of the Moon, Fox answered, “Sure. I mean, I can’t sh*t on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don’t want to blow smoke up people’s ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting. And once you realize that, it becomes almost fun because you can be in the moment and go, ‘All right, I know that when he calls Action! I’m either going to be running or screaming, or both.’"
In subsequent interviews, Fox told reporters that Bay's treatment of her was demeaning and misogynistic. She claimed that part of her audition for the role involved being filmed while washing his Ferrari. Fox hated working with Bay so much that she even went so far as to liken him to Adolf Hitler. Fox said that Bay tried to “create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for.”
After those comments, Fox was unceremoniously booted from the series. She and Bay buried the hatchet, however, and she ended up playing April O'Neil in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies produced by her former director.
