12 Actors Who Slammed Their Own Movie Before Release
Even Tom Hardy isn't pleased with Venom.
Look at the CV of your favourite actor or actress and you can bet they’ll have a fair few turkeys on it, which is an almost unavoidable reality of the business. Nobody sets out to make a terrible movie - not even Adam Sandler - but even a promising script can go horribly awry during production and creative differences can lead to a stillborn movie; just look at the Fantastic Four reboot.
That’s why even the most talented actors have a few duds they’d like to forget about, and if ever knock them it’s usually years after the fact when their comments can’t impact it anymore. The ever professional Michael Caine waited years before tearing strips off of The Swarm or Jaws: The Revenge and George Clooney has been known to offer refunds to people who tell him they saw Batman & Robin.
Some actors aren’t so kind and have no issue throwing stones at a movie before it’s even gotten a proper release. It’s usually a case of sour grapes when this happens; maybe they had a miserable time making it and want the world to know, or they were contractually forced to appear in it.
Whatever the case, it can be fun to see it play out in public.
12. Brad Pitt - The Devil's Own
It was an open secret that Brad Pitt hated working on The Devil’s Own, a 1997 thriller where he played an IRA man with a not terribly convincing Irish accent. The movie was something of a pet project for Pitt for years, but when it finally got made it got rewritten into oblivion and Pitt tried to back out.
The studio apparently threatened to sue for quite a bit of money if he tried, so he slogged on with filming, despite finding the new script to be "dogs**t." Constant rewrites didn’t improve his mood onset, and it’s said he didn’t exactly gel with co-star Harrison Ford either.
He later said of the experience in Newsweek – just before the film came out – that it was “the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking – if you can even call it that – that I’ve ever seen.” Hardly a glowing endorsement, but the film went on to be a modest hit. Ford didn’t seem all that excited about it either, but then again, when does he?