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The Hollywood movies actors hated making and why some say they'd never do it again
“Look, I’ll be honest. I f**king hate that movie. I hate that movie."
Universal Studios/Frazer Harrison/Kevin Winter/Getty Images
- Olivia Garrett
Published: Thursday, 29 October 2026 at 7:00 am
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Do you like every part of your job? No way. So how can we expect actors to love every piece of work they make?
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Like us, some performers are just trying to pay the bills, some are pressured into taking on certain projects, and some gleefully sign on to a movie... only to realise they've made a terrible mistake when production starts.
But there's having a hard time on a movie set – and there's these actors, who came for their old work and came out swinging.
Whether it was bad scripts, on-set rivalry or even physical injury, here are the movies actors hated making and what they've said since.
Channing Tatum – GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Channing Tatum. Gerald Matzka/Getty Images for Sony Pictures
"Look, I’ll be honest. I f**king hate that movie. I hate that movie."
Nowadays, Channing Tatum's star power means he has his pick of movie projects, but once upon a time he had a lot less say.
After starring in his first feature film, Coach Carter in 2005, the Magic Mike star was signed into a three-picture deal with Paramount – enter GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
Despite having a deep love for the franchise as a child, Tatum passed on the movie no less than seven times. In an interview with Howard Stern, the actor discussed the project, saying: "They give you the contract and they go, ‘Three-picture deal, here you go.’ And as a young [actor], you’re like, ‘Oh my god, that sounds amazing, I’m doing that!’
“Time goes by and you get other jobs and you’re building your quote and you have a dream job you want to do. And … the studio calls up and they’re like, ‘Hey, we got a movie for you, we’re going to send it to you.’ And they send it to you, and it’s GI Joe."
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"The script wasn’t any good. And I didn’t want to do something that I … was a fan of since I was a kid and watched every morning growing up – and didn’t want to do something that was, one, bad and, two, I just didn’t know if I wanted to be GI Joe.”
Tatum asked if he could play the role of Snake Eyes, but was denied and ended up with the role of Duke instead.
What happened after?
Despite the film earning a decent $302 million worldwide, Tatum maintains that GI Joe is one of his few movie regrets. In the same interview, he told Stern: "Look, I’ll be honest. I f**king hate that movie. I hate that movie."
So, when the sequel, GI Joe: Retaliation, came around, the actor insisted Duke be killed off in the first 10 minutes.
During a video lie detector test with Vanity Fair, the She's the Man star was asked if the character's death was his decision and did he regret it. His answers: "Yes" and "No".
Charlize Theron – Mad Max: Fury Road
Charlize Theron.
"As an actor, you want to be challenged, but you don’t want it to be that bad."
Charlize Theron has described her time on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road as “traumatic” – both due to the conditions on set, and her fraught relationship with co-star Tom Hardy.
As a whole, the cast have been open about the difficulty of filming for six months in the Namibian desert, and add to it that Theron had a six-week old daughter on set with her and you have a recipe for stress.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, Theron said: "As an actor, you want to be challenged, but you don’t want it to be that bad.
"It was a long, long shoot. I have never done anything that needed that kind of endurance, and I don’t think I ever will [again]. Man, it was f**king tough."
And that's before we get to the feud with Hardy.
In 2022, a tell-all book about the making of the movie revealed claims about the extent to which the pair clashed. Theron told writer Kyle Buchanan for Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road that they were "like two parents in the front of the car".
“We were either fighting or we were icing each other – I don't know which one is worse – and [our co-stars] had to deal with it in the back,” she recalled. “It was horrible! It was not a conducive working environment... I apologise profusely.”
Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. Getty
The movie’s editor, J Houston Yang, added to this, saying: “Boy f**king howdy, was it clear that those two people hated each other. They didn’t want to touch each other, they didn’t want to look at each other, they wouldn’t face each other if the camera wasn’t actively rolling.”
This dislike reportedly came to a head on a day when Hardy showed up to the set three hours late. Camera operator Mark Goellnicht claimed: "[Charlize] didn’t go to the bathroom, didn’t do anything. She just sat in the War Rig. She's now in the War Rig, sitting there with her make-up on and a full costume for three hours.
“Tom turns up, and he walks casually across the desert. She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him. She screams it out. It's so loud, it's so windy. He might've heard some of it, but he charged up to her and went, 'What did you say to me?' He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened.”
Speaking to GQ in 2015 about reports that Theron was scared of him on set, Hardy said: "Charlize is an intense woman. Very intense, actually. In a good way... She’s a very serious actor. So I don’t see why she would ever be intimidated by me or in any way feel frightened. I think that was more... b*****ks."
What happened after?
Theron and Hardy have both suggested they could have behaved differently, with Theron saying to the New York Times: "In retrospect, I didn’t have enough empathy to really, truly understand what he must have felt like to step into Mel Gibson’s shoes. That is frightening!"
She continued: "And I think because of my own fear, we were putting up walls to protect ourselves instead of saying to each other, 'This is scary for you, and it’s scary for me, too. Let’s be nice to each other.' In a weird way, we were functioning like our characters: Everything was about survival."
Meanwhile, Hardy added: "I would agree. I think in hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me."
She has also admitted the trauma of filming doesn't take away from the film's greatness: "I hate saying this because I don’t ever want to encourage young actors or storytellers to believe that they need trauma or sacrifice because I really, really don’t believe you do, but there’s a little bit about the circumstances around that movie that I think gave it the magic."
Theron noted that she “never really appreciated or respected George Miller’s vision” until she saw the final cut of the film. However, she did not return for the prequel, which instead starred Anya Taylor Joy as a younger Furiosa.
Tippi Hedren – The Birds
Tippi Hedren in The Birds.
"It was brutal and ugly and relentless."
Tippi Hedren has famously spoken about how she suffered while filming Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller The Birds.
In the film's notorious bedroom scene, in which Hedren's character Melanie is trapped in a room with a flock of the bloodthirsty creatures, the actress explained that she was left severely traumatised.
While the original plan was to use mechanical birds, Hedren said that she learnt on the morning of filming that the machines weren't working, and they would be using live birds instead.
In her memoir, Tippi, she recalled: “I heard Hitchcock yell, ‘Action,’ and right on cue, the handlers began hurling those live birds at me. It was brutal and ugly and relentless.”
Across the next few days, Hedren said she was continuously attacked with dozens of live ravens, pigeons and doves.
“I was pelted with still more live, screaming, frantic birds, while the birds that were tied to me began pecking me as they’d been trained to do,” Hedren wrote. “I was too focused on my own survival to notice, but I was told later that it was even more horrifying and heartbreaking for the crew to watch than the previous four days had been, and there wasn’t a thing anyone but Hitchcock could do to put a stop to it.”
Hedren's breaking point was when a bird tied to her shoulder pecked close to her eye, causing her to snap: "I'm done," and begin sobbing.
A doctor convinced Hitchcock his star needed actual rest, which she took. She returned a week later to finish the film.
What happened after?
Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery in Marnie. Getty
The following year, Hedren and Hitchcock worked together on Marnie – a thriller about a kleptomaniac held hostage by a wealthy businessman played by Sean Connery.
Hedren said that she was under contract with the director and unable to get out of it, and claimed that Hitchcock explicitly told her to "make myself sexually available and accessible to him".
In her memoir, she wrote of one incident where he allegedly showed up at her dressing room and “put his hands on me”, continuing: “It was sexual, it was perverse.”
After rebuffing his advances, she claimed that Hitchcock threatened her career, to which she said she told him: "Do what you have to do."
She continued: “It was absolutely awful, and as soon as the movie Marnie was over, I was out of there. That was the end of the Hitchcock relationship. I finished the movie and didn’t have any other contact.”
As for The Birds, Hedren looked back fondly on the media storm and accolades surrounding the film, calling it a "thrilling, amazing time".
She wrote: “I never forgot for one moment that it was all happening because of Alfred Hitchcock, and I never forgot for one moment that I’d earned it.”
Richard Dreyfuss – Jaws
Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw in Jaws.
"If there’s a subject that, if I had a fair choice of reaching for a pistol and putting it in my mouth, I would choose that before I chose talking about Jaws again."
The set of Jaws was quite problematic – with technical difficulties, script issues, and tensions galore, and Richard Dreyfuss, who played the movie's Oceanographer Matt Hooper, was right in the thick of it.
In one of his many interviews about the film, Dreyfuss made it clear there was chaos on set from day one. Chatting to Route Magazine he said: "We started shooting on May 2 without a script, without a shark and without a cast.
"I wasn’t hired until May 3 and the script was all over the place, and no one realised that we, as a film unit, were the first film ever attempted on the real ocean. Just imagine the unanticipated consequences of that ignorance.”
The film famously went over budget and took far longer than scheduled. During the ocean scenes, director Steven Spielberg was keen on long takes, which were made worse when the mechanical shark, Bruce, kept breaking down.
As a result, the three main actors (Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider) were often left sitting around between scenes. According to Dreyfuss, this reportedly lead to some tension between himself and Shaw.
Dreyfuss described Shaw as "an enormous personality" in the 2010 documentary Jaws: The Inside Story.
"In private, he was the kindest, gentlest, funniest guy you ever met. Then we'd walk to the set, and on our way to the set he was possessed by some evil troll, who would then make me his victim."
Spielberg added: "Robert would basically humiliate Richard into taking a chance. For instance, Robert would say, 'I'll give you a hundred bucks if you climb up to the top of the mast on the Orca and jump off into the water.'"
What happened after?
This feud, which Spielberg later referred to as "the great Shaw-Dreyfuss feud", became well-known, and even inspired a West End play in 2021.
When later asked about the atmosphere on set, Dreyfuss added, “Not great. It was very difficult – a lot of stress. I’d much rather create the necessary stress out of acting than have to endure it in real life.”
Dreyfuss has also told Route: "If there’s a subject that, if I had a fair choice of reaching for a pistol and putting it in my mouth, I would choose that before I chose talking about Jaws again."
Zoe Saldaña – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Zoe Saldaña. Samir Hussein/WireImage
"I almost quit the business. I was like, ‘F**k this!’ I am never putting myself in this situation again."
Before she became the queen of franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek and Avatar, Zoe Saldaña started off her career with a small role on Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl – and it almost cut the whole thing short.
After starring as the pirate smuggler Anamaria, Saldaña confirmed that on-set politics and members of the crew made her "hate" the experience.
She told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014: "Those weren’t the right people for me. I’m not talking about the cast. The cast was great. I’m talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors.
"It was a lot of above-the-line versus below-the-line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs. It was very elitist."
She continued: "I almost quit the business. I was 23 years old, and I was like, F**k this!' I am never putting myself in this situation again. People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I’m not important. F**k you.'"
Eight years on, Saldaña expanded a bit on what made the situation so strenuous: "It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members,” she said.
"We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days. I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast.”
She went on: “I walked away not really having a good experience from it overall. I felt like I was lost in the trenches of it a great deal, and I just didn’t feel like that was okay.”
What happened after?
Zoe Saldaña in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Alamy
Saldaña never appeared in any of the Pirates sequels, however she did share that she received an apology from the first movie's producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
"Years later, I was able to meet with Jerry Bruckheimer, who apologised that I had that experience, 'cause he really wants everyone to have a good experience on his projects," Saldaña said.
"That really moved me – the fact that he remembered that I had mentioned that during press, I guess, or an engagement I had done years before and that he felt compelled to bring it up and to take accountability."
Christopher Plummer – The Sound of Music
The Sound of Music. Getty/Bettman
"Watching The Sound of Music is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.”
While comparing The Sound of Music to being "beaten to death by a Hallmark card," was originally a quip made by actor Doug McClure, Christopher Plummer reportedly liked to quote it when asked about the beloved musical – which he famously hated.
Plummer was 34 when he was hired to play the dashing Captain Georg von Trapp, and already known as a prolific stage actor. He took the role thinking it would help him train to play Cyrano de Bergerac in a Broadway musical, but was underwhelmed by the experience.
Plummer described himself as a "curmudgeon" on set, admitting he would drink and eat so much his costumes needed to be resized. His issue, he told The Hollywood Reporter, was "it was so awful and sentimental and gooey. You had to work terribly hard to try and infuse some minuscule bit of humour into it".
To The Boston Globe, he explained: "I was a bit bored with the character. Although we worked hard enough to make him interesting, it was a bit like flogging a dead horse. And the subject matter is not mine. I mean it can't appeal to every person in the world. It's not my cup of tea."
However, the film of course became an enduring success, becoming the first movie ever to gross more than $1 million.
What happened after?
Plummer later reflected on the experience, writing in his memoir: "I was a pampered, arrogant young b**tard, spoiled by too many great roles in the theatre. I still harboured the old-fashioned stage actor’s snobbism toward moviemaking.”
He even came to appreciate The Sound of Music in later life, recalling how it came on during children’s Easter party and he found: “I suddenly could see why it brought so much pleasure to so many people.
"Here was I, cynical old sod that I am, being totally seduced by the damn thing.”
Megan Fox – Transformers
Megan Fox. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
"He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is."
The famous scene of Megan Fox fixing a car in Transformers lives in cultural folklore, especially with the added context that the then-20-year-old said has she was told to just "be hot" on set by director Michael Bay.
Fox starred in the first two Transformers films as car thief Mikaela Banes in 2007 and 2009, helping the franchise gross well over $1 billion at the global box office. However, she was replaced in between movies two and three after giving a scorching interview to the magazine Wonderland.
"He’s like Napoleon,” Fox said of Bay, “and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.
"So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward."
Claiming that she would receive a note to just “be hot” while filming, Fox said: "'Mike,’ I’ll say, ‘Who am I talking to? Where am I supposed to be looking at?’ And he responds, ‘Just be sexy.’ I get mad when people talk to me like that."
While Fox's representatives said she left the franchise willingly, Bay claimed in an interview at the third film's premiere that it was executive producer Steven Spielberg who demanded her dismissal. Bay said: "You know the Hitler thing? Steven said fire her right now."
What happened after?
Michael Bay and Megan Fox.
Bay and Fox have likely healed any potential feud, as the actress was cast in Bay's 2014 remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In 2020, Fox also spoke out in defence of Bay when the internet accused him of asking her to give a 'sexualised' audition.
In a length social media post, she wrote: “While I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support, I do feel I need to clarify some of the details.”
She denied suggestions that her Transformers audition was exploitative, saying she was “19 or 20” and that she was “at no point undressed or anything similar”.
She added: “I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to ‘wash’ or work on someone’s [car] in a way that was extraneous to the script.
“When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.”
Fox added: "These specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry.
"There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart."
Bob Hoskins – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
"In the end it screwed up my brain."
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is arguably one of the best family(ish) movies of the 1980s. Long before the likes of Coyote vs Acme and Looney Tunes Back in Action, the film takes place in a world where humans and cartoon figures – known as toons – coexist.
One day, private detective and known toon hater Eddie Valiant is hired to prove the innocence of one particular toon accused of murder. Bob Hoskins stars as Valiant in the beloved comedy – but did you know his iconic performance came with a price?
To achieve the appearance of toons and humans appearing on screen together, the live-action footage for the movie was shot first and the 2D animation added later.
This meant the live actors had to perform their scenes with nothing in front of them – green screen suits and tennis balls on sticks were used at the time for CGI, but director Robert Zemeckis decided to forgo them.
The burden of this fell most heavily on Hoskins, who had the most interaction with the Toons and simply had Charles Fleischer standing off-set feeding him Roger Rabbit's dialogue while wearing a full-size Roger Rabbit costume – anyone would go mad!
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
To help, Hoskins trained himself to hallucinate, and to great success, if the crew are to be believed. In behind-the-scenes documentary The Making of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, several crew members remarked on Hoskins's ability to follow sight-lines correctly.
However, as Hoskins later told The Express: "In the end it screwed up my brain. I would be sitting, talking normally and suddenly a weasel would creep out of the wall at me.”
When the film was through, Hoskins's doctors told him to take five months off – but he didn’t work for a year.
What happened after?
The experience on Who Framed Roger Rabbit left Hoskins exhausted, and disillusioned with the whole Hollywood experience. In an interview with The Guardian he said: "Hollywood does exactly what it says it's going to do – makes you rich and famous – and I thought, 'Right, I'll sign on for that, I'll have some rich and famous.'" As a result, he never stayed for long in LA, preferring to stick to London.
"There's nothing wrong with Hollywood, but it is a town that is completely based on vanity, its whole function is vanity. But I haven't got anything to be vain about! I'm just a short, fat middle-aged man with a bald head."
Jessica Alba – Fantastic Four
Jessica Alba and Chris Evans in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. 20th Century Fox/Marvel Entertainment
"I hated it. I really hated it."
While plenty of people have nostalgia for the 2005 Fantastic Four movie (and its sequel), Sue Storm (AKA The Invisible Woman) actress Jessica Alba is not one of them.
“I hated it. I really hated it,” she reportedly told Elle magazine regarding her experience making the superhero films.
“I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer. The director was like, ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.'"
Alba has also discussed the moment Sue Storm reappears on a bridge, completely naked.
“I thought that was awful,” she said while giving a talk at the Red Sea Film Festival. “It was very humiliating in real life. I grew up with a pretty conservative family, and I am a pretty modest person. I dreaded that scene for weeks. I have a lot of whiplash from those days.”
What happened after?
Despite her time on set, Alba still has a lot of love for the character she played. “She was a woman I looked up to,” she said. “She was very maternal and very kind, but also not a pushover; she spoke her mind. She had a great moral compass. No matter who you are, you can look up to her. Oftentimes, the women in these stories need to be saved by a guy or the villain, the problem in the story. This was back then. It’s different now.”
Actress Vanessa Kirby has since taken up the mantle of Storm in the Fantastic Four remake, and Alba has made it clear she supports the remake: “I usually watch those movies with my kids, and if Sonic was out, my son wants to watch it 85 times in a row.
"When it comes to movies that are for the family, my kids dominate what we watch for sure. But I have to convince him because we have to see it! I love Marvel, and they’re so fun.”
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