12 Times Actors Have Admitted They Suck at Acting
People love to say they’re “their own harshest critics,” but none of these A-listers are anywhere near as scathing as Roger Ebert was when he got all worked up.
Carol Burnett
After boarding a flight, the pilot unexpectedly announced her presence and teed up a cabin-wide viewing of her latest film, The Front Page. She picked up on subtle clues that told her she stank up the joint: “So the movie’s over, the shades come up — and not one person turns around to wave or smile at me. I thought, ‘Oh God, it was as bad as I thought.’”
Shia LaBeouf
He thinks he blew his turn in the Indiana Jones franchise: “You get to monkey-swinging and things like that, and you can blame it on the writer, and you can blame it on Steven (Spielberg). But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it.”
Anya Taylor-Joy
The scariest part of The Witch to her was her own performance: “I thought I’d never work again; I still get shivers thinking about it. It was just the worst feeling of, ‘I have let down the people I love most in the world. I didn’t do it right.’”
Megan Fox
She says she only used “about seven percent” of her acting brain in Transformers: “I’m terrible in it. It’s my first real movie, and it’s not honest and not realistic. The movie wasn’t bad, I just wasn’t proud about what I did.”
Adam Driver
He had one short, goofy scene in Inside Llewyn Davis, as a backup singer in a folk band, and his reaction to his work is dripping with self-loathing: “I hated what I did.”
Eddie Redmayne
He regrets the voice he crafted in Jupiter Ascending: “My character had had his larynx ripped out by this wolf man, and so I made the slightly bold choice — which I thought was right. I won a prize for it for the Worst Performance of the Year.”
Jennifer Aniston
She said her boyfriend once popped on The Leprechaun to torture her: “It was one of those things when I tried to get that remote out of his hand, and there was just no having it. He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, this is happening.’ I just kept walking in and out, cringing.”
Pierce Brosnan
Your mom’s favorite James Bond regrets everything he did with the character: “I have no desire to watch myself as James Bond. ‘Cause it’s just never good enough. It’s a horrible feeling.”
George Clooney
He says Batman & Robin was bad for a lot of reasons, but doesn’t shy away from taking his fair share of the blame: “The truth of the matter is, I was bad in it. Akiva Goldsman, who’s won the Oscar for writing since then, he wrote the screenplay. And it’s a terrible screenplay, he’ll tell you. I’m terrible in it, I’ll tell you.”
Christian Bale
He said he “didn’t quite nail it” as Batman in Batman Begins, and then Heath Ledger came along and utterly upstaged him: “Heath turned up and just kind of completely ruined all my plans. Because I went, ‘He’s so much more interesting than me and what I’m doing.’”
Daniel Radcliffe
He says the mistakes young actors normally get to make in private are memorialized on film forever: “That’s why it’s hard to watch a film like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, because I’m just not very good in it. I hate it. My acting is very one-note and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn’t come across.”
Paul Newman
He took out a full-page ad in a newspaper to apologize for his performance in Silver Chalice, which said, “Paul Newman apologises every night this week — Channel 9.”
