Actors Come Clean On What The Worst Movie Of Their Career Was

The British actor most famous for his role as grim-faced P.I. Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had no sense of humor when it came to his least favorite acting job. In a 2011 Q&A with The Guardian, when he was asked to name the worst job he'd ever done, Hoskins responded, "Super Mario Bros." He then described the 1993 bomb based on the world's most famous plumber as his "biggest disappointment," saying that if he could edit his past, he wouldn't do the film again.

This wasn't just hindsight creeping in after bad box office results. During shooting, Hoskins would drink whiskey in between scenes and give snarky comments to the press, telling an LA Times reporter, "My seven-year-old son is quite depressed about my playing Mario. He knows I can't even program a VCR, let alone play the game." To add injury to insult, he broke a finger during a stunt.

Hoskins wasn't the only person associated with the movie who had regrets. Even before the notoriously disastrous shoot was over, Dennis Hopper, who was playing villainous businessman King Koopa, let everyone know that he'd only taken the role for the money. The actor also spent three hours screaming at the directors over one of the endless script changes. The film ultimately made only $20 million — about half its budget — and directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton never made another Hollywood movie.

Sylvester Stallone was just an underdog actor until Rocky turned him into a Hollywood champion. Of course, the guy has made a lot of questionable content over the years, and in a 2006 interview with Ain't It Cool News, Stallone said his worst film was Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, a 1992 "comedy" co-starring Estelle Getty. And Stallone didn't stop there. The action star described Stop! as "maybe one of the worst films in the entire solar system, including alien productions we've never seen."

However, over a decade after those comments, Stallone may have topped even Stop! In June 2019, he posted a video to Instagram where he said that Escape Plan 2: Hades was "the most horribly produced film" that he'd ever had "the misfortune to be in." Escape Plan 2 co-starred 50 Cent and Dave Bautista, but despite the star power, the movie was critically reviled. Evidently, Stallone hates it too, and the man isn't worried about pulling punches when dissing his own projects.

Dev Patel found stardom with the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. So naturally, everyone was curious about his next film, 2010's Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was a huge studio movie with expectations and bureaucracy to match the budget. Of course, once it hit theaters, the movie was hated by pretty much everyone on planet Earth, but for a while, Patel didn't really want to talk about the picture. 

Back in 2014, the most he would say was, "Yeah, that wasn't the best move, was it?" Rumors about his dissatisfaction with the M. Night Shyamalan picture gathered pace in 2015, when Patel was filmed apologizing to a fan, saying, "I'm sorry about this film. It was a little bit s***, wasn't it?" While the video didn't show what movie Patel was talking about, the folks at IndieWire theorized he had to be referencing The Last Airbender. 

Patel opened up a little further in a 2016 roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying, "I don't know what I would like to play, but I know what I'm afraid of playing: those big studio movies." Patel went on to add that he felt "overwhelmed by the experience" of making The Last Airbender, and he says he felt like he "wasn't being heard." Still, Patel tried to throw in a learning experience, adding that while making the movie was scary, it taught him the valuable lesson about saying "no." So the next time Patel is offered a major bomb, chances are good he's going to turn it down.

Long before he became the Caped Crusader, Robert Pattinson launched his career with another batty role. The man got his big break playing a vampire in the Twilight series — although Edward Cullen was more sparkly than sinister. 

Based on a series of YA novels, the Twilight franchise was loved and loathed with almost equal passion ... and Pattinson was firmly on the latter side of the equation. In interviews on press tours for the films, his comments ranged from bewildered to outright dismissive. Gems include, "I hardly get to do any vampire stuff. I don't get to kill anyone," and, "If Edward was a non-fictional character, if you met him in reality, he's one of those guys who'd be like an ax murderer." 

Since the final installment came out in 2012, Pattinson has mostly stuck to more artistic movies, working with acclaimed indie-focused directors like Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, and the Safdie brothers. However, he's managed to find a few positive things about Twilight since then, saying now that the intensity around the films has died down, he appreciates fans' enjoyment of it a lot more. He even found a part of the film that he enjoyed, saying, "[New Moon] genuinely does have an incredibly good soundtrack. I completely forgot, but the soundtracks were quite ahead of their time."

In 2012, when a 3D version of Titanic docked in theaters for the 15th anniversary, Kate Winslet told CNN, "Every single scene, I'm like 'Really, really? You did it like that? Oh my God.' ... I have a hard time watching any of my performances, but watching Titanic I was just like, 'Oh God, I want to do that again.'"

It's surprising to hear that Winslet wants to give her role as Rose a second go, given what she went through the first time around. Director James Cameron was notoriously explosive, and in 1997, Winslet told the LA Times, "There were times when I was genuinely frightened of him." On top of that, she nearly drowned while shooting one scene, and Cameron simply made her do it again. (Cameron dismissed her claim that she was in real danger.) She also chipped a bone, came out with various bruises and scrapes, and was regularly performing in cold water. For close-ups, she was submerged 12 feet underwater and weighted down so she wouldn't move. Small wonder she doesn't like watching that over and over again on the big screen.

Since the rise and demise of his relationship with Angelina Jolie, you could make the case that Brad Pitt has become more famous for his personal life than for his movie career. But back in the '90s, Brad Pitt was the iconic movie star, and he occasionally had some blunt comments about those fame-making movies. Specifically, in 1997, Pitt called out The Devil's Own, in which he starred as an undercover IRA terrorist, opposite Harrison Ford's cop. Pitt told Newsweek, "We had no script. Well, we had a great script ,but it got tossed for various reasons." 

According to Pitt, the cast and crew were forced "to make something up" as they went along, a move that Pitt labeled "the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking — if you can even call it that — that I've ever seen." He also called out then-head of Columbia studios, Mark Canton, for forcing production to continue. Pitt apparently regretted his comments pretty swiftly, adding in a follow-up interview reported on by CNN, "Everyone was working hard. We weren't trying to just throw out a crap film. You know, we were doing our best."

Jamie Lee Curtis impressed fans and critics alike when she returned to Haddonfield, Illinois, in 2018's Halloween. But even though Curtis has starred in classics like A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies, she hasn't totally escaped making bad movies. According to Curtis, the worst movie she ever made was Virus, a movie about a tugboat crew that stumbles upon an almost abandoned ship when things get crazy with robots and alien monsters. While the premise might sound awesome, critics hated the film, and Curtis clearly wasn't happy with it, either. When she went to ComicCon in 2018, she described the movie as a "piece of s***."

Curtis was even more direct in 2012, telling IGN that when she and her movie star friends compare bad movies, Virus is her trump card. "That's the only good reason to be in bad movies," she explained. "Then when your friends have [bad] movies you can say 'Ahhhh, I've got the best one.' I'm bringing Virus." Well, at least she found her silver lining.

Ben Affleck already had a list of dubious movies under his belt before he strapped on the utility belt to play Batman in Zack Snyder's much maligned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. There was Armageddon and Gigli, but of all his awful films, Affleck hates Daredevil the most. The 2003 adaptation of the Marvel comic about a blind lawyer who fights crime in the courtrooms by day and the city streets at night, Daredevil is despised by every human being who's ever stepped inside a movie theater. But the man who loathes it the most is definitely its leading man.

Before the release of Batman v Superman, Affleck explained that part of the reason he wanted to play a superhero again was because he wanted a second chance at the genre. "Part of it was I wanted for once to get one of these movies and do it right — to do a good version. I hate Daredevil so much." Unfortunately, his attempt at the Batman franchise didn't deliver the redemption he'd wished for, as the movie was widely panned by critics, but hey, as bad as Zack Synder's film may be, at least it's no Daredevil.

Having earned an Oscar, an Emmy, two Tonys, a Golden Globe, and more, you'd think Viola Davis would be able to move on from her less-than-stellar roles more easily than anyone else in Hollywood. But there's one role that still troubles Davis. In 2018, when The New York Times asked Davis if there was a job she wished she'd taken, Davis reworked the question to dish on a job she wished she'd turned down. And that was the role of Aibileen, a black maid working in 1960s Mississippi who joins the Civil Rights Movement in 2011's The Help.

Davis was quick to praise her co-stars and director Tate Taylor before getting to the reason behind her retroactive regret. As she put it, "I just felt that at the end of the day, that it wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard." According to Davis, the whole film was supposedly about black women working and raising children in 1963, but she feels the movie didn't really put their stories front and center. Davis was nominated for an Oscar for her role, but with her feelings towards the film, she's probably just fine with not winning that particular trophy.

Millions of kids grew up wanting to be G.I. Joe, but when Channing Tatum got the chance, he was less than thrilled. In 2015, six years after G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra came out, Tatum told Howard Stern that when he received the script, it was so bad he refused to make the movie. He was also wary because he'd been one of those wide-eyed kids: "I didn't want to do something that I ... was a fan of since I was a kid and watched every morning growing up."

Unfortunately, in 2009, Tatum didn't have the star power to muscle his way out. He told Stern that after his first movie role in 2005's Coach Carter, he signed a three-picture deal with Paramount. They cashed in part of that deal with G.I. Joe, and informed Tatum that they would sue him if he refused to make the film. Tatum's career recovered — in 2015, he was the 13th highest-paid actor in the world. But G.I. Joe wasn't done with him after Cobra: he went on to appear in the aptly named 2013 sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation (but didn't disclose to Stern if that was part of the Paramount deal.)