10 Underrated Actors Who Endure Unjustified Hate
The following list is not necessarily comprised of great or even good actors, rather it is a collection of actors who endure criticism at an unnecessarily high level in relation to the actual quality of their performances. While no one on the list is above criticism, some of it can't be helped and some of it is more related to horrible career decisions than actual abysmal performances. The criteria for the list is first that they had to be modern actors due to the fact that there weren't angry Internet bloggers around in the 1950's to actually make someone seem absurdly overrated or underrated in the way they are today. Secondly, they had to be high profile actors who are recognisable to the average movie-goer, because otherwise not as many people have wrong opinions about them. Thirdly, they obviously had to have endured a good bit of not altogether unwarranted criticism, albeit a little more then they deserve. Fourthly, an attempt was made to disassociate the actual skills of the person in consideration with the hype around them (with one or two exceptions). Onto the list... 10. Hayden Christensen
Okay, I will not actually attempt to defend his acting ability as he is clearly not a good actor, however I would like to put his performance in perspective. First, he is playing a younger version of arguably the most iconic movie character of all time. The aforementioned character spent 99% of his screen time with a mask on and voiced by the baritone-voiced James Earl Jones. Then George Lucas made the admirable but misguided attempt to make him an angst-ridden teenager spouting some of the worst dialogue in recent film history. There are no actors I know of who could have pulled out a good performance, although admittedly Hayden Christensen did not help himself at all. But guess which other actors turned in bad or mediocre performances in the prequel trilogy?Liam Neeson, Ewan Mcgregor, Samuel Jackson and Christopher Lee. The point being that no matter how good of an actor you are, you have to have a script that actually works. It also helps if expectations aren't unrealistically high.