10 Actors Who Publicly Spoke About Hating Being Famous

As Lady Gaga sang at the very beginning of her career, many celebrities are "doin' it for the fame, 'cause we got a taste for champagne and endless fortune." At first, being famous sounds great. There are the mansions in Beverly Hills, the swanky parties, the Uber Blacks ... you get the idea. When you're on top of the world, millions of people love you, and life seems easy.

Many famous people, though, have discovered that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. When millions of people know who you are, there's no such thing as privacy anymore. You're recognized when you go to the grocery store and hang out with your friends, and, if you're Ben Affleck, when you pick up the Dunkin' Donuts order from your front porch. That can feel incredibly overwhelming, and some people crumble under the pressure of the spotlight.

Lots of actors choose to suffer in silence, but some have made their discomfort with celebrity known publicly. Lady Gaga, after all, told Billboard in 2020, "I used to wake up every day and remember I was Lady Gaga — and then I would get depressed," she said. "My existence in and of itself was a threat to me." That depression has affected everyone from Brad Pitt to Selena Gomez, from child stars to people who already had stable adult lives by the time they became well-known. It's tough stuff, and these actors have publicly spoken about hating being famous.

The 2000s were a particularly weird time to get famous. The paparazzi were everywhere, social media was in its infancy, and reality television was blurring the lines between the mystique of movie stars and the approachability of normal people. It was a very parasocial decade, in other words, and few people know this better than Robert Pattinson, one of many actors who regret their 2000s movie roles. He was in the "Harry Potter" franchise before jumping to "Twilight," and Pattinson resented the media hysteria that followed him and co-star Kristen Stewart everywhere they went. "The only thing people would ever ask me about was being famous," he told The New York Times in 2024. "You go into, like, a fugue state."

To cope with his fame, Pattinson began lying in interviews. On "The Today Show," he claimed he'd once witnessed a clown die at a circus. He confessed that the infamous anecdote never happened. "There was absolutely no hesitation at all [in my voice]," he told the newspaper. "I'm like, 'What on earth? Are you possessed?'"

Over time, Pattinson came to look at fame itself as a performance of sorts. Eventually, it all got easier, because he's no longer the sparkly vampire he once was. "There's something about the nature of being fresh meat," he mused to The New York Times, noting that he can now walk around in public without being stopped.

Brad Pitt has been famous for quite a long time, ever since he broke out thanks to his role as a bad-boy heartthrob in "Thelma & Louise." Pitt ruled the 1990s, finding himself in high-profile relationships with everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Jennifer Aniston. In the 2000s, though — after he met Angelina Jolie on the set of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," left his wife, and got with her instead — Pitt's public image faltered.

The next decade, the rollercoaster romance took an even crazier turn. "Brangelina" fell apart in what was one of the biggest Hollywood scandals that defined the 2010s. Jolie accused Pitt of having abused their children, and Pitt decided that he didn't really like being famous after all. "It's been an annoyance I've had to always deal with in different degrees, large and small, as I do the things I really want to do. So, it's always been this kind of nagging time suck or waste of time, if you let it be that, I don't know," he told GQ when asked what it's like to have his personal life make headlines. "I don't know. Mostly I feel pretty ... My life is fairly contained."

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Once upon a time — by which we mean the late 1990s and early 2000s — there were few people in Hollywood more famous than Josh Hartnett. He was the preeminent heartthrob of his era, making people everywhere swoon in films like "The Virgin Suicides," "Pearl Harbor," and "Black Hawk Down." Unless you were closely following his career in the latter half of that decade, however, it probably seems like Hartnett disappeared from Hollywood.

It turns out that Hartnett was not a fan of the pressures of fame. He decided to scale down his career, uncomfortable with the paparazzi attention and the fans who wanted to know every detail about his love life. He starred in the Showtime series "Penny Dreadful" and popped up in films like "Oppenheimer," but for quite a while, Hartnett intentionally pulled back from the spotlight. As actors sometimes do, he moved abroad to escape it all, living in an English village instead of the Hollywood Hills. 

As he geared up for a mainstream comeback in the 2024 film "Trap," Hartnett explained his smaller decades to The Guardian. "I just didn't want my life to be swallowed up by my work," he reasoned. "And there was a notion at that time you just kind of give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people back then. They got obliterated by it. I didn't want that for myself."

As hard as the 2000s might have been for celebrities like Robert Pattinson and Josh Hartnett, it was even more difficult for women. That decade brought us some pretty over-the-top, harmful beauty standards, and certain actors were blamed for trends over which they had no control. When Megan Fox starred in the "Transformers" franchise, her stunning good looks became a detriment, and everyone from directors to the press to the fans offered intense opinions about her body instead of her acting talent.

Fox later told Esquire (via Yahoo!) that she feared her sex-symbol star image detracted from her opportunities. "It ate every other part of my personality, not for me but for how people saw me, because there was nothing else to see or know," she said. She also said she hated that people didn't understand the scrutiny that came with it. "What people don't realize is that fame, whatever your worst experience in high school, when you were being bullied by those ten kids in high school, fame is that, but on a global scale, where you're being bullied by millions of people constantly," she said.

In fact, Fox thinks this killed "Jennifer's Body." Though the film is now (rightfully!) a cult classic, when it was released in 2009, people somehow assumed that Fox wasn't in on the joke, failing to recognize the film as a brilliant satire that skewered her star image.

In the early 2010s, Shailene Woodley led the cast of an ABC Family show called "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." She played a pregnant high school student who becomes a teen mom, and the show chronicled her coming-of-age as she had to raise a child amid all the pressures of high school. It might as well have been Woodley herself who had a secret life, though, because she didn't fully break out until she led films like "The Spectacular Now" and the "Divergent" franchise in quick succession.

On the precipice of superstardom, Woodley spoke with iVillage (via Marie Claire UK) about the potential new life that awaited her on the other side of a few film openings. "To me the C-word is 'celebrity,' the F-word is 'famous,' and the S-word is 'star,'" the future "Big Little Lies" star explained. "I despise those words."

The "Divergent" film series fell apart, but Woodley has continued working despite the failure of the project that was supposed to launch her to the next level. She told Net-a-Porter that she'd opted out of the trappings of fame, explaining that she worked on a farm between films. "The idea of magazines, press lines, red carpets, and fashion, all of that was so overwhelming that I stayed away from it all," she said.

Shia LaBeouf has been famous most of his life. Ever since he started on the Disney Channel show "Even Stevens," LaBeouf has attracted quite a following. As he grew up and graduated to blockbusters like "Transformers" and its sequels, LaBeouf struggled with the transition to grown-up fame. In fact, he did more than just struggle; he lashed out, racking up an upsetting list of allegations of sexual assault. In 2025, he settled a lawsuit against the singer and actor FKA twigs, his former partner, who accused the "Disturbia" star of having abused her while they were together.

In fact, the 2010s were particularly rough for LaBeouf (and people around him). He claims to have become a performance artist of sorts, telling people that he was intentionally acting out in public as a way to comment on the frightening level of fame he'd experienced. In 2015, he made headlines when he made some insensitive comments about fame at a film festival. "The requirements to being a star/celebrity are namely, you must become an enslaved body. Just flesh — a commodity, and renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things," LaBeouf said (via Variety). "The star is a byproduct of the machine age, a relic of modernist ideals."

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

Compared to some of the people on this list, you might be tempted to say that Elizabeth Debicki hasn't dealt with the same level of fame as those who might be considered A-list. Still, Debicki's portrayal of Princess Diana on "The Crown" made people take notice, and that's not all she's known for. She's been in films like "Widows," "Tenet," "The Great Gatsby," and "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," and she told Vogue Australia that while the show was airing, she would get recognized all the time from "The Night Manager."

Though she's been in high-profile roles, Debicki feels no need to chase the fame side of her profession. "The main thing it does is take away one of the most valuable things people possess, which is a right to privacy. I've seen that on people I really love and care for," she ruminated to Vogue Australia. "Fame does not discriminate between how vulnerable you feel that day, what's happening in your personal life, how tired you are, or how much you really don't want your photograph taken." 

Thankfully, playing the Princess of Wales had a benefit: People were impressed by her transformation into the character, but they didn't notice as much when she was just herself. Debicki doesn't mind. "I have a very normal, boring life," she confessed to the magazine, before correcting herself. "Well, it's not that normal, I guess, or boring."

Selena Gomez has been famous for as long as she can remember. When she was a child, Gomez was part of the cast of children who populated the playgrounds of "Barney & Friends," alongside fellow future Disney Channel icon Demi Lovato. Gomez would go on to lead the cast of "Wizards of Waverly Place," which she parlayed into a successful pop career, a relationship with Justin Bieber that was the stuff of stan twitter legend, and a significant amount of time as one of the most-followed persons on Instagram.

You might expect that, for Gomez, fame is old hat, but she has repeatedly spoken out about how difficult it is to have people hanging off your every word. "I don't handle all of this as well as people think, so it's been important to really figure out what makes me feel grounded," she admitted to IntoTheGloss in 2014.

A full decade later — now the Emmy-nominated star of "Only Murders in the Building" – she told ELLE that she thinks about those early years differently ... or, actually, pretty much the same way. Gomez said she wouldn't choose to be a child star again if she could, because it made growing up very difficult. "Adding a lot of pressure from a lot of people didn't help me develop a sense of self in my twenties," she said. "It was a very difficult time. I live with it every day."

In 2008, a profile of George Clooney in TIME called him "the last movie star." The actor, who first broke out as a doctor of "ER," had come to represent a certain type of fame that wasn't around much anymore. For a long time, Clooney was a charismatic bachelor, yet also was someone whose personal life didn't often make him tabloid-famous in the way that his peers — Brad Pitt, for example — fell victim to.

In that profile, Clooney said it was all intentional and that he'd had to learn how to navigate a certain type of movie stardom that didn't just not exist anymore, but maybe hadn't existed back in the day. "Clark Gable wouldn't have been Clark Gable if there was 'Access Hollywood' and 'Entertainment Tonight,'" he pointed out.

In the years that followed, the lifelong bachelor married Amal Clooney, and to escape the potential lifestyle that would've awaited the power couple in Hollywood, they moved abroad. "I was worried about raising our kids in L.A., in the culture of Hollywood," he told Variety in 2025, fearing that they wouldn't turn out normal. "France — they kind of don't give a s*** about fame. I don't want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don't want them being compared to somebody else's famous kids."

Harrison Ford never intended to be famous. Before he was cast in "Star Wars," Ford was a humble carpenter, one of his clients being Francis Ford Coppola. That connection led him to George Lucas, who saw those good looks and offered him the role of Han Solo, the space-faring playboy that would make Ford famous.

The trouble is, Ford has always resented the fame that came with having played several iconic characters. For the most part, he's joked about it, insulting his spaceship pilot repeatedly. While appearing on "Late Show with David Letterman" (via HuffPost) for example, Ford infamously called the character "Ham Yoyo." The site also reported that he once told MTV, "I'm done with him," and then he went on to (spoilers!) kill him off in the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy that dominated the 2010s.

Ford is, of course, incredibly wealthy, but he doesn't think his net worth is worth much, so to speak. "There's nothing good about being famous. You always think, 'If I'm successful, then I'll have opportunities.' You never figure the cost of fame will be a total loss of privacy. That's incalculable," he told WENN (via DigitalSpy). "You can get the table you want in a restaurant. It gets you doctor's appointments. But what's that worth? Nothing." Eventually, Ford confessed that his overall net worth is, indeed, the point. "I'm in it for the money. And I mean that in the nicest way possible," he said. "This is my job." Fair point.