Faking their emotions is basically the core of an actor’s job. Sometimes, they’re so good at it that audiences don’t even realize they were actually having a horrible time. Other times, actors purposefully put themselves into a challenging emotional state through method acting.
Here are 15 times actors were secretly miserable on set (and why):
2.
Charlize Theron reportedly had a contentious working relationship with costar Tom Hardy on Mad Max: Fury Road. According to Mark Goellnicht, a camera operator who was interviewed for the book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, the actors argued after Tom was three hours late while Charlize had been waiting on set in costume the entire time. Mark said, “[Tom] was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point because then she said, ‘I want someone as protection.’ She then had a producer that was assigned to be with her all the time.”
3.
Likewise, Charlize Theron tried out method acting for The Devil’s Advocate because director Taylor Hackford wanted her to. In 2022, Charlize told the Smartless podcast, “I realized on that film that that was definitely not a process that was gonna work for me. There was something so exhausting about it. My life was miserable. I wasn’t happy.”
4.
Zoë Saldaña hated working on Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. In 2014, she told the Hollywood Reporter, “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. I almost quit the business.”
5.
In 2016, Amy Hill told the AV Club that she didn’t like working on The Cat in the Hat because of her costar Mike Meyers’s behavior. She said, “He had his handlers dress his trailer, and his area was all covered with tenting because he didn’t want anybody seeing him. It was so weird. It was just the worst. It was like I was there forever, and my daughter was 2 and a half, and I felt like I was missing her first everything. I was miserable. I just thought it was really rude for him to not take all of us into consideration.”
6.
According to her The Devil Wears Prada costar Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep was “miserable” playing Miranda Priestly. In 2023, Emily told Variety’s Actors on Actors, “She said it was one of the first times she’s tried Method acting. But it made her so miserable.”
7.
In 2019, Sanaa Lathan told CBS Local, “I was miserable [filming Love & Basketball]. I can laugh about it now. I got the job, and I think Gina [Prince-Bythewood, the writer/director] finally got to the point where she had to hire somebody. It’s almost like she hired me because she couldn’t find somebody else. There wasn’t a lot of joy, and there wasn’t a lot of trust in me.”
8.
In 2018, Christopher Eccleston told the Guardian, “Working on something like [G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra] was horrendous. I just wanted to cut my throat every day.”
9.
Christopher Eccleston also told the Guardian, “And [Thor: The Dark World]? Just a gun in your mouth.”
10.
Michael B. Jordan allowed himself to get to a difficult emotional place for his Black Panther role. In 2023, he told Rolling Stone, “Killmonger allowed me to access the pain. And the unapologetic frustration that I had. But then, obviously, there’s a sadness that comes along with that. I dove into that for a lot longer than I ever had before. So coming out of that [role] it was hard to want love. Because during shooting I kept myself from family and children, and away from everything that Killmonger never had.”
11.
In 2015, Brie Larson told Variety that playing Ma in Room was an “emotional marathon.” She said, “It hit a point near the end of shooting that there was so much intensity with every scene — tears you want to come out, you don’t have the hydration for them.”
12.
In 2023, Freddie Prinze Jr. told TooFab that he had a challenging time on the I Know What You Did Last Summer set because director Jim Gillespie didn’t want him there. He said, “It’s not that we weren’t on the same page. I knew what the correct choices were for the Ray character. He wanted a different actor, a really good actor named Jeremy Sisto, who I know and I like and respect very very much…There was no passive aggressiveness — which I hate — he was very direct in the fact that ‘I don’t want you in this movie.’ So when that’s your first job, and you hear those words, it just wrecks you, man. It just wrecks you.”
13.
Then-17-year-old Nicolas Cage reportedly had a miserable time filming Fast Times at Ridgemont High because some of the other actors made fun of him. In 1996, he told Entertainment Weekly, “I was pretty much the nerd to everybody — people would ask me to be removed from their eye line.”
14.
In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer was so miserable in her Catwoman suit that, once filming wrapped, she burned them all. In 2007, she told the Oklahoman, “I hated wearing that catsuit so much. By the end, we had a bonfire, and I was just so happy. There were a zillion of them because they’d break, and you’d have to throw one on.”
15.
And finally, David Cross only appeared in all three Alvin & the Chipmunks movies out of contractual obligation. In 2011, he told IndieWire, “This last film [Chipwrecked] was literally, without question, the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life.”