8 Embarrassingly Bad Movie Auditions Starring Famous Actors

Amazingly, they weren't all rejected!

by Danny Meegan
Megan Fox
Paramount

Over the years, the film industry (and the Internet) has gifted us some truly wonderful movie auditions.

From Henry Thomas in E.T. to Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it's often easy to see why an actor lands a role, whether they're just a perfect fit for the material or they completely shine in the handful of minutes they're given.

But, very occasionally, the Internet gifts us some truly terrible ones too - video proof that even talented, popular actors are capable of having a bad day at the office, just like the rest of us.

Only, your embarrassing moments probably won't end up on YouTube for the whole world to see. And laugh at.

8. Gwyneth Paltrow (Jurassic Park)

Role? Ellie Sattler.

Did she get the part? No.

If there's one positive Gwyneth Paltrow can take away from this audition it's that her failure to land a role in Jurassic Park didn't really affect the success of her movie career.

She simply isn't right for this part. Here, she's too much the innocent, sweet little girl as opposed to tougher, more hardened likes of Laura Dern, who eventually won the role, and Helen Hunt, who also auditioned.

She sounds like she doesn't understand the words she's reading, when in reality, her character should be fluent in this type of scientific conversation - and it's all capped off with the Oscar-worthy line "maybe they're weird. Maybe dinosaurs are weird."

What a wonderful, insightful analysis.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!