10 Shocking Movie Roles Actors Regret, From Will Smith to Ben Affleck

Even award-winning actors are disappointed if they are cast in a box-office bomb and have no say over the final outcome.

Sometimes big flops involve actors signing on to a big-budget blockbuster they shouldn’t have, or a film that deals with what might be best left undealt.

Some of these stories, nowadays, appear as if written by the actors themselves: cringing at their choices, saying what everyone else feels: ‘Dear God, why did I do that role?’ (George Clooney, looking back on Batman ‛‛ ‛‛ Robin, 1997) The production of these ‘wisdom of hindsight’ insights is by now a well-established industry.

Many actors have spoken openly about their worst films, and often regret their involvement in them. It’s tough for actors to predict how the public will view a particular film before they even show up to set, and many are locked into contracts for multiple movies, whether they like the franchise or not. By the time many actors can recognise that they’re in a critical or box office bomb, it’s too late; hindsight is 20/20.

The actors cited in that list almost always fall into the same familiar traps. Sometimes, it’s a big-budget franchise, often a superhero film, that quietly signs up a respected actor before they really know how awful the movie is going to be. Then there are the performers who are outsmarted by shifting cultural values, who later wish they’d passed on a film that doesn’t treat its sensitive subjects – think race and gender – with the necessary consideration.

10 Batman

George Clooney Admitted to Having The Weakest On-Screen Version

He has since admitted it was a terrible idea But of the many dozen actors to have donned the Batman suit in live-action cinema, it is only George Clooney who has wholeheartedly regretted doing so. When Joel Schumacher wanted to replace Val Kilmer after Batman Forever, he fell back on Val Kilmer’s position in another famous movie: the one about the doctor with no lips. In what became known as the worst Batman film of all-time, Batman and Robin, the writer-director Schumacher pulled the casting stunt of a lifetime, bringing in actual heartthrob George Clooney. Clooney has since admitted it was a terrible idea.

In fact, George Clooney has apologised for Batman ● Robin multiple times at conventions, saying ‘I wanted to apologise to all the fans out there that have stayed faithful to the franchise, because I didn’t do it right. I apologise for Bat-nipples, I really do. I had nothing to do with them. But I was there, so I apologise.’ (He reportedly kept a photograph of his Batman on his office desk for a reminder ‘never to make a film for commercial purposes’. Presumably not counting his post-apology DCEU cameo as Batman in The Flash.)

9 Cypher Raige

Will Smith Sees After Earth as His Biggest Failure

Given how much of a beloved star he is, and how jam-packed his résumé is with shining successes, it’s easy to forget that a few of Will Smith’s movies have been duds. Turning down the chance to star in The Matrix in favour of Wild Wild West is probably the worst mistake of his long career, but according to Smith himself, the biggest film he regrets making is After Earth, the largely panned sci-fi epic he starred in alongside his own son, Jaden. In After Earth, father-son duo – played by Will smash-land onto a hostile alien world.

As far as Smith is concerned, however, the film that’s wounded him more than any other is After Earth – not merely because of box office underperformance, but most of all because of a son’s attachment: ‘I developed the script for the movie After Earth with my son and that film not turning out how I wanted it to really hurt, because I’m very associated with it… I know that it’s not as good as it could’ve been.’ As indeed it isn’t. So bad was After Earth for Smith’s pop culture capital that his son Jaden followed through on the threat to soil his good name that he’d made in On the Set With Jaden Smith in 2013, when he filed for emancipation at the ripe old age of 15: ‘the one thing I use as evidence is After Earth’. It didn’t merely bruise Smith’s irridescent career, but dented the relationship with a son in a real and meaningful way.

8 Rick Deckard

Harrison Ford Was Never a Huge Blade Runner Fan

Few actors seem as open in their contempt for their most iconic roles as Harrison Ford is. Ford has little love, or patience, for Star Wars, the series that made him famous; and his alleged disinterest in the MCU has apparently caused little ripples of annoyance on the set of Captain America: Brave New World (Variety). Harrison Ford apparently thinks little of his role in Blade Runner; the film has two separate edits in circulation.

Harrison Ford has gone on the record calling Deckard a ‘Detective who did no detecting’ (GQ) and, to cap it all, Ford clashed with his director Ridley Scott and co-star Sean Young throughout the film’s inordinately long shooting schedule – so long that much of the film had to be edited and re-shot in the wake of its original release, due to the amount of voice over work the first cut required. All of which makes Blade Runner the film that Harrison Ford detests most out of the entirety of his career.

7 Nina Simone

Zoe Saldaña Deeply Regrets Rer Involvement in The Controversial Biopic

It doesn’t mean every film the actor stars in is necessarily a regret, no matter how bad it is critically or at the box office.Nina was a highly controversial biopic about the musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone, played by Zoe Saldaña. To better fit Simone’s looks, Saldaña darkened her skin and wore a prosthetic nose. The decision to use dark make-up for the role was rightly met with outrage from critics.

In the film’s release, Zoe Saldaña has said that she regrets accepting the proposal, explaining that: I think when I did it back then I was like: Oh OK, I’m a Black woman, I have the permission to do whatever I want, because I am a Black woman. But it’s Nina Simone and she was a real person, and she had a life, and she had a journey that should’ve been honoured to the most specific detail. [From Entertainment Weekly.] It’s evident that Nina is a rather awkward scar on Saldaña’s otherwise lucrative and successful career.

6 The Invisible Woman

Nearly Caused Jessica Alba to Quit Acting Altogether

These days, the Fox Fantastic Four duology exists in an ungainly limbo between sweet mid-2000s relic and sad, sad misfire of a comic saga. The person among its former cast most willing to admit how much she dislikes the movies is Jessica Alba, who played Susan Storm, a.k.a. The Invisible Woman.

Alba went on to speak out against the filmmaking practices of director Tim Story.

One particular scene sticks out in Jessica Alba’s memory from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) when she was directing an emotional scene as her character was informed that her brother had been killed. Initially, Alba’s pain and grief were not viewed as appropriate. ‘Tim Story reeled me in and said, “Why are you making this too real and too visceral?”’ Alba continues. ‘He was like, “This is a movie. You need to cry prettier.” bad taste in Alba’s mouth and Sophie’s Choice nearly left her on the set and out of the movie business altogether. Alba’s time on the set is a serious cause for regret.

5 Lili Elbe

Eddie Redmayne Shouldn’t Have Been The One to Tell Elbe’s Story

Although Eddie Redmayne became well known for his apperance as the magizoologist Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts Harry Potter prequels, he’d also starred the year before in a little-remembered film called The Danish Girl (2015), loosely based on the life of the transgender artist Lili Elbe, who the first gender-affirming surgeries in the modern world. But what controversy brought The Danish Girl to the public’s attention was that it starred Redmayne in drag.

And if he might have made the film with good intentions, Redmayne has recently said he wouldn’t play the role today. ( Via Today ), calling his involvement in The Danish Girl “a mistake.”

The decision to have an actual transgender woman play the leading role in the story of such an important gay-history figure and icon is – if you’ll forgive the pun – somewhat transgressive; the callous use of a cisgendered actor for sheer marquee value is The Danish Girl’s true crime. Though he might have been motivated by the best intentions, The Danish Girl has prompted Eddie Redmayne to say that, if the part were offered to him today, he wouldn’t take it (Today) as ‘a mistake’. Demonstrating just why he has come to that conclusion are the criticisms the film attracted for such a decision.

4 Green Lantern

Ryan Reynolds has made a point of making fun of his past mistakes

Green Lantern – a movie so ill-advised and poorly received that very few people remember it existed, before shared cinematic universes were cool – was DC’s biggest cinematic flop until the fact that they were cinematic flops became cool. Saddled with an abysmal script and terrible CGI, the few people who recall Green Lantern don’t look at it with much fondness at all, even its star, the actor Ryan Reynolds. If it wasn’t for Reynold’s continued vitriol-spewing hatred of the film, it might not even be in the cultural zeitgeist at all.

But among Reynolds’s more successful superhero excursions, the Deadpool trilogy, he made numerous jokes at the film’s expense. In Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson even travels back in time to kill his actor so he never takes the role in the first place. Reynolds has said that fans should avoid watching Green Lantern – I regret being in Green Lantern is putting it mildly.

3 Daredevil

Ben Affleck is pained by his first superhero outing

If Ryan Reynolds was worried that his rep as a superhero might be cursed following Green Lantern, you can bet he wasn’t the only one. Ben Affleck’s Daredevil (2003) stands as the most notorious example of a cinematic misfire of a comic icon bearing the unfortunate misfortune of that name. Affleck has since gone on to redeem himself as the DCEU’s Batman, but his first outing in a caped crusader cowl remains a curse he’d rather forget.

As Ben Affleck has said, Daredevil is ‘the only movie I’ve ever made that I actually regret’ (Indie Wire). ‘I still say, I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got ****ed up the way it did stays with me,’ Affleck remarked. ‘I think that there’s some sort of fuel for trying to achieve something good [with Batman in the DC Extended Universe] by correcting something that I see as a flaw in a past performance.’

2 Madame Web

Dakota Johnson didn’t hide her dislike for Sony’s final product

Often, because of the number of NDAs, contracts and social positions with directors that many actors sign on to projects that they end up hating, it takes years for actors to come out and say that they despise a given film. Not so for actor Dakota Johnson, who promptly derided the role of Madame Web in Sony’s superhero film by that name. Sony had hoped to create a critically distinct entry into the world of Spider-Man-adjacent stories to star the star in a film. Sony’s inability to innovate translated into the film being one of the worst box office flops of the year at time of writing.

Even on the press tour for the film, Johnson appeared bored by the whole endeavour, and was not shy about expressing her cool reception toward the final product, and superhero movies in general. At a certain point, Dakota Johnson was so blunt about Madame Web that she admitted that she ‘doesn’t belong in that world’. The following interviews after Johnson’s statement give the impression she was sold a bill of goods – she thought she was starring in a MCU film only to end up making a movie with Sony instead.

1 Tiger Lily

Rooney Mara hates that she played a whitewashed character

A grimly revisionist version of the Peter Pan story, Pan has gone on to be remembered as one of the all-time biggest box-office bombs. Among the film’s multitude of blunders, casting Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily, a Native American princess, was the most eyebrow-raising. The Native American characters in Disney’s original animated feature Peter Pan were hardly a model of cultural sensitivity, but one would think that – given the medium and the times – the 2015 live-action film could have done better.

Since the film came out, Mara has made it clear that she also regrets being cast in a film that whitewashed a much-loved character. In response to the film’s immediate backlash at casting Mara, Mara said: I don’t ever want to be on that side of it again. I can understand why people were upset and frustrated.–It is abundantly clear that Rooney Mara doesn’t view her participation in the film as something she can be proud of to this day.

Sources: Variety, IndieWire, Today, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, Esquire, and Deadline