10 Great Actors Who Played The Worst Versions Of Characters
When amazing actors give us the worst interpretation of an iconic character.
It's always exciting when a brilliant actor gets cast to play an iconic character, leaving fans to ponder what magic they might bring to the part, in turn perhaps even delivering the truly definitive rendition of the character on screen.
And it's great when an actor lives up to that promise, aided of course by tight writing and sharp direction, but there are those rare unfortunate times where an A+ actor gets cast to play a role they seem perfectly suited for, only for them to totally whiff it and fumble the bag completely.
That's sadly the case with these 10 terrific acting talents, who for all of their skill as performers, their work in these high-profile parts just didn't cut it.
Perhaps they took a big swing and totally missed the mark, or maybe they were constrained by poor writing, slack direction, or outside factors entirely beyond their control.
Whatever the reason, each of these portrayals of indelible pop-culture characters were colossal letdowns, enough that they ended up ranked dead last where major iterations of their respective characters are concerned.
The lesson here? No matter how great a piece of casting might seem on paper, it's all about the follow-through...
10. Sally Field - Aunt May
Spider-Man's Aunt May Parker has been prominently portrayed by four actresses on-screen - each of them supremely talented performers who, on paper, were perfectly cast for the part.
Rosemary Harris brought enormous emotional depth to May in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films, while Marisa Tomei gave MCU fans a younger, spunkier iteration, and Lily Tomlin spiritedly voiced another version of her in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Now, nobody's going to come out and blame Academy Award winner Sally Field for botching the role of May in The Amazing Spider-Man films, because of course the fault rests entirely with the series' scripts.
May is written as bafflingly forgettable in both movies, something Field herself even acknowledged in a 2016 Howard Stern interview, where she hilariously said:
"It's really hard to find a three-dimensional character in it. You work it as much as you can, but you can't put ten pounds of s**t in a five-pound bag."
It's tough to argue with that. Field added that she only took the role to honour the film's producer Laura Ziskin - a friend of hers who died from cancer before its release.