Scenes That Marvel Actors Regret Filming
With the ever-growing popularity of Marvel films around the world as well as an expanding internal universe filled with a massive array of characters and stories, it's easy to forget that some of the creatives onscreen might not actually end up happy with their place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While the majority of Marvel actors seem to enjoy their roles, their colleagues, and the finished products, a number of stars have ended up being upset enough with how their scenes turned out that they actually regret having filmed them at all.
These regrets run a huge gamut for Marvel actors, from complaints about their role being overly one-dimensional to performance problems and even issues with characters being presented onscreen that in ways that don't fully honor the spirit of the comics. Which scenes do Marvel actors most regret filming? We've rounded up some answers — and they might surprise you.
Chris Hemsworth didn't like being shirtless as Thor
For an actor who is known for his muscular physique and stature almost as much as his acting, it turns out that Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth, doesn't enjoy filming scenes shirtless, especially if it wasn't in the script. Speaking about 2013's Thor: The Dark World, Hemsworth told MTV that his shirtless scene was mandated by director Joss Whedon. "He just said that there needed to be something romantic in there. Then he said, 'Chris, get your shirt off.' I said, 'Well, I don't know. What's the why? What are we doing?'" he recalled. "The justification was that it was him coming home from battle, washing blood off his hands. It is what it is. How to weigh into that without sounding like an idiot?"
He was even more upset during Thor: Ragnarok since he felt shirtless Thor was getting exploitative and objectifying him. "This time around, there wasn't one in the script, which I was really happy about," Hemsworth told CinemaBlend. "Then [director Taika Waititi] said, 'No, I think we need a shirt off scene.' I was like, 'Ugh, no we've done that. Don't make me do it again!'... I just think it has to be different each time. You have an obligation to mix it up and advance it in some way."
Josh Brolin didn't like killing Loki
Avengers: Infinity War opens with a fierce battle between Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Heimdall (Idris Elba), and Thanos (Josh Brolin) as they unsuccessfully try to pry the Power Stone from Thanos' hand. Loki's attempts to double agent himself out of Thanos' path of rage fails and Thanos brutally chokes Loki to death and dumps his body. Unlike Loki's previous deaths, this one sticks (sort of). Loki's murder sets a bleak tone for one of the darker installments in the MCU, and still doesn't even hint at the level of carnage we see by the end.
For Thanos, killing the God of Mischief might have been just another day at the office, but it was a good deal harder to process for the man playing him. "He had been with that character for so long. And he's so lauded for doing it," Brolin told USA Today. "Tom was so vulnerable at that moment. So choking him out wasn't the most fun thing I have ever done." Glad to hear Brolin is only a monster onscreen.
Jeremy Renner was unhappy with Zombie Hawkeye scenes from the first Avengers movie
The onscreen version of Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye, has often come under fire for being rather vanilla in terms of character development. But none of these criticisms were what Hawkeye actor Jeremy Renner had a problem with when it came to his scenes in the first Avengers film.
Hawkeye has barely been onscreen long enough to establish a presence for himself before he's put under Loki's spell. Talking to GamesRadar, Renner said: "For 90% of the movie, I'm not the character I signed on to play... It's kind of a vacancy. [He's] not even a bad guy, because there's not really a consciousness to him. ... To take away who that character is and just have him be this robot, essentially, and have him be this minion for evil that Loki uses... I was limited, you know what I mean? I was a terminator in a way. Fun stunts. But is there any sort of emotional content or thought process? No."
Lea Thompson said Howard the Duck was 'painful'
Long before Howard the Duck made brief cameos in 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy and 2017's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, he made his full-length feature film debut in 1986's descriptively titled Howard the Duck. Also starring Lea Thompson, Tim Robbins, and Jeffrey Jones, this story about a parallel universe where anthropomorphic ducks are the majority species and an accident brings one of them here to Earth is one of the raunchier Marvel adaptations in spite of its PG rating. When asked about her role as Howard's love interest Beverly in Howard the Duck, Lea Thompson told Huffington Post that "pain" is the first word that comes to mind about the project.
"I was the number one star of it," she told the Hollywood Reporter. "It was painful." Among other bizarre things, Howard the Duck features an intimate scene between Thompson and the Howard, which is as graphic as innuendo can get without veering straight into bestiality. In the same interview she revealed she initially turned down the now-classic John Hughes film Some Kind of Wonderful — but quickly signed on after Howard the Duck bombed.
Ryan Reynolds was upset about how his first Deadpool appearance turned out in X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds is one of the character's biggest fanboys — as well as the dedicated producer who finally brought the wisecracking pansexual assassin to the screen after years of trying. But it's easy to forget that Reynolds played Wade Wilson/Deadpool years before his solo film, with a small role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine that supposed to lead into Reynolds' own Deadpool movie.
"It was a very frustrating experience. I was already attached to the Deadpool movie. We hadn't at that point written a script yet. [Origins] came along and it was sort of like, 'Play Deadpool in this movie or we'll get someone else to,'" Reynolds told People magazine. "And I just said, 'I'll do it, but it's the wrong version. Deadpool isn't correct in it."
To make matters worse, X-Men Origins was filming during the writers' strike of 2007 and 2008, so Reynolds had to write his own lines. "So we were in the middle of production, there were no writers, no anything. Every line I have in the movie I just wrote myself because in the script we had, it said, 'Wade Wilson shows up, talks really fast.' I was like, 'What? What am I supposed to do with that?'"
Michael Fassbender hated how his Magneto scenes came out in X-Men: Days of Future Past
Like his predecessor in the role, Sir Ian McKellan, Michael Fassbender brought a wealth of stage presence to his portrayal of traumatized Holocaust survivor Eric Lenscher and his alter ego, the morally ambiguous Magneto. Fassbender brought new pathos and humanity to his version of the character in X-Men: First Class, deepening the role significantly. But unfortunately, by 2016's X-Men: Days of Future Past, Fassbender was no longer happy with his work in the role, and was visibly embarrassed when scenes from the film aired at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I don't actually like that performance there, to be honest," Vulture reported Fassbender saying. "I just think it's me shouting. It's just like... some dude shouting." In Fassbender's defense, the film was extremely battle-heavy — it does make sense that its bad guy would be doing a lot of shouting.
Jessica Alba regrets making Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
The Fantastic Four franchise has struggled with a series of setbacks and disappointments — like the ones experienced by Jessica Alba, who almost quit acting after suffering the indignity of an insensitive director while playing Sue Storm in 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
"The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like, 'Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in,'" SyFy quoted Alba as saying. "And I'm like, But there's no connection to a human being. And then it got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don't want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work? And so I just said, 'F— it. I don't care about this business anymore.'"
Hugo Weaving was unhappy with his role as Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger
Hugo Weaving has been in some of the biggest movie franchises in history, including Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the Matrix series. It makes perfect sense that an actor of his caliber would also find a place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which he did when he played the villain Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger. Unfortunately, while he was glad he gave it a go, he didn't enjoy the experience or how his character came out onscreen.
"It's not something I would want to do again," Weaving told Collider. "I think I've done my dash with that sort of film. It was good to do it and try it out, but to be honest, it's not the sort of film I seek out and really am excited by. As an actor, to do all sorts of different films is great. It stretches you in different ways. But, I increasingly like to go back to what I used to always do, which is to get involved with projects that I really have a personal affiliation with." Weaving added that he signed a multi-picture deal and said Marvel could have forced him to reprise the role — but also pointed out the silliness of forcing a performer to show up for a project they don't want to be in.
Mickey Rourke regretted his role in Iron Man 2
Mickey Rourke was an absolute scene-stealer as Ivan Vanko, a.k.a. Whiplash, in Iron Man 2. Ivan Vanko's father Anton worked with Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr.) father to develop Stark Industry's arc reactor. After Anton wanted to sell the technology for profit, Howard Stark (John Slattery) had him deported back to Russia, where he was sent to a Siberian gulag and died. Ivan carried a grudge against the Starks while developing the technologies he ultimately used to strike back against Iron Man. Rourke brings an underlying empathy and humanity to his role that makes his performance incredibly compelling, but he told ScreenRant that the way Ivan Vanko was written was far too one-dimensional for his taste.
"The bad guy doesn't always have to be one-dimensional, you know? It's to try to find layers and reasons to justify why he is what he is," Rourke argued. "The performance I tried to bring to [Vanko] ends up on the f***ing floor. That could cause you not to care as much. Not to want to put that effort in when you try to make it an intelligent bad guy or a bad guy who justifies what his reasons are. So I fight for that all the time. This character was hard because he was written as pure evil."
Idris Elba felt Heimdall was absurd
Multitalented Idris Elba has his hands in a number of different creative ventures, quite literally. A well-known DJ, he travels the world playing various clubs and festivals in the midst of his thriving career as a film and television actor. But unlike many of his colleagues who love being part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Elba told The Telegraph that his MCU movies became a chore — specifically after filming Avengers: Age of Ultron, when his "head was all over the place."
After spending eight months in South Africa making the Nelson Mandela biopic Mandela, Elba added that coming back to shoot scenes for Thor: The Dark World was "torture," explaining, "I'm actually falling down from a spaceship, so they had to put me in harness in this green-screen studio. And in between takes I was stuck there, fake hair stuck on to my head with glue, this f***ing helmet, while they reset. And I'm thinking: '24 hours ago, I was Mandela.' ... Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out."
Andrew Garfield regretted both of his Spider-Man movies
Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield both played Spider-Man within a few years of each other, but only Andrew Garfield came out and said that he thought his scenes and character development in The Amazing Spider-Man were all wrong.
During a Variety "Actors on Actors" segment when he was interviewed by Amy Adams, Garfield said, "I signed up to serve the story, and to serve this incredible character that I've been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit to a certain degree." He blamed this on the big-budget nature of the movies as well as the capitalist machine that is more interested in making money than content further noting, "I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America really, it's a corporate enterprise mostly." All's well that ends well: Garfield exited the role after a pair of films and was replaced by another British actor, Tom Holland, who took up the web-shooters starting with Captain America: Civil War.
Edward Norton hated how his version of the Hulk turned out
Marvel took a long time trying to find a version of Hulk that worked for audiences and critics alike before finally hitting paydirt with Mark Ruffalo's portrayal. Before Ruffalo took the part, the studio suffered a disappointment with The Incredible Hulk in 2008, which starred Edward Norton as the title character. In comments reported by ComicBook.com, Norton told the audience at Bruce Willis' Comedy Central roast that he had problems on the set because he "wanted a better script." He's claimed that he was invited to help improve the script but Marvel reneged; either way, the end result failed to live up to expectations.
The bad blood between Marvel and its erstwhile Hulk actor is apparently mutual. "We have made the decision to not bring Ed Norton back to portray the title role of Bruce Banner," the studio said in a statement prior to the release of 2012's Avengers movie. "Our decision is definitely not one based on monetary factors, but instead rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members." Norton clearly wasn't the only one who regretted his work on The Incredible Hulk.
Ben Affleck says Daredevil was his biggest career mistake
Before he played DC's Batman, Ben Affleck starred in one of the lesser-loved Marvel adaptations as lawyer-by-day, vigilante-by-night Matt Murdock, also known as Daredevil. Unlike other Marvel-inspired bombs that turned into cult classics, Affleck's Daredevil has yet to be reevaluated — in fact, it's mostly been forgotten, and its star doesn't mind one bit. In comments to Playboy Magazine (via Business Insider), Affleck said, "The only movie I actually regret is Daredevil. It just kills me. I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got f—ed up the way it did stays with me. Maybe that's part of the motivation to do Batman."
Unfortunately, when he was announced as the new Batman, it was his performance in Daredevil that had fans concerned about his ability to pull off the role. "If I thought the result would be another Daredevil, I'd be out there picketing myself," he laughed at the time. "Why would I make the movie if I didn't think it was going to be good and that I can be good in it?"