When moustachioed septuagenarian cowboy Sam Elliott turned his six shooters on Jane Campion’s Western drama The Power of the Dog recently, branding the film a “piece of s***”, his comments sent shockwaves through Hollywood.
It wasn’t just the fact that Elliott was unusually blunt in his criticisms, it was that working actors can usually be relied upon to abide by an industry-wide omertà when it comes to criticising other people’s work.
A Quiet Place’s John Krasinski nicely summed up the prevailing attitude in a 2019 interview with the New York Times, recalling a moment when he made the faux pas of telling director Paul Thomas Anderson that a film he’d recently seen was “not a good movie.”
Anderson took Krasinski to one side and politely chastised him. “Don’t say that,” he told him. “Don’t say that it’s not a good movie. If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other.”
Still, there have always been a few devil-may-care characters who decide to break ranks and tell us how they really feel. Here are 12 times when an actor has laid into a film, all guns blazing:
Orson Welles on Rear Window: “One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen”
In 1983 Citizen Kane director and star Orson Welles recorded a series of candid conversations with his friend the director Henry Jaglom. He planned to use the tapes to write his autobiography, but tragically Welles died of a heart attack just days after their last meeting. His frank opinions eventually surfaced in Jaglom’s 2013 book My Lunches with Orson, which revealed Welles’ low opinion of stars like “stupid” Laurence Olivier and “hateful” Spencer Tracy. He reserved particular ire for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. “I saw one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen the other night,” said Welles of the 1954 classic. “Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be. I’ll tell you what is astonishing. To discover that Jimmy Stewart can be a bad actor… Even Grace Kelly is better than Jimmy, who’s overacting.”
Alec Guinness on Star Wars: “Second-hand, childish banalities”
When esteemed Shakespearian actor Alec Guinness first saw himself as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, he thought the film “had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun.” However, as the years went by he began to grow uneasy about the obsessiveness of its fans. In his 1999 memoir A Positively Final Appearance, Guinness recounted one such interaction, along with his withering assessment of the film itself. “The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco, when a sweet-faced boy of 12 told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over 100 times,” Guinness wrote. “His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy’s eyes, I thought I detected little starshells of madness beginning to form, and I guessed that one day they would explode. ‘I’d love you to do something for me,’ I said. ‘Anything, anything,’ the boy said rapturously. ‘You won’t like what I’m going to ask you to do.’ ‘Anything, sir, Anything.’ ‘Well, do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?’ He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. ‘What a dreadful thing to say to a child!’ she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right, but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of second-hand, childish banalities.”
Tallulah Bankhead on All About Eve: “I’ll pull out every hair in her moustache”
Stage and screen actor Tallulah Bankhead is today perhaps best remembered as being the inspiration for Disney’s Cruella De Vil, but it was another character rumoured to be based on her which sparked a famous feud: All About Eve’s aging Broadway star Margo Channing. Bankhead was in the running to play the role herself in the acclaimed 1950 drama, but eventually lost out to Bette Davis. If that wasn’t bad enough, Bankhead became convinced that Davis had copied her hair, her voice and her exaggerated mannerisms. A guest on Bankhead’s NBC radio show The Big Show once asked if she’d ever seen All About Eve, to which she drawled: “Every morning when I brush my teeth.” Of Davis she added: “Dahling, just wait till I get my hands on that woman. I’ll pull out every hair in her mustache,” and quipped: “If they ever make a film All About Me, I’ll play it myself.”
Robert Duvall on The Shining and A Clockwork Orange: “Terrible performances”
In 2010, Apocalypse Now’sRobert Duvall livened up an edition of The Hollywood Reporter’s Actor’s roundtable by dropping napalm all over sacred cow Stanley Kubrick. “To me, the great Stanley Kubrick was an actor’s enemy,” he stated, going on to argue that his painstaking working process made it impossible for his actors to do their jobs. “I can point to movies he’s done, the worst performances I’ve ever seen in movies: The Shining, A Clockwork Orange. Terrible performances. Maybe great movies, but they’re terrible performances. How does he know the difference between the first take and the seventieth take? I mean, what is that about?”
Michael Caine on Jaws: The Revenge: “By all accounts it is terrible”
National treasure Caine has never had any qualms about revealing he took certain jobs purely for the money, once remarking: “First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.” It was definitely a case of the latter when Caine appeared in 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge, the fourth installment in the killer shark franchise. “I have never seen itbut by all accounts it is terrible,” noted Caine. “However, I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific.”
Sean Penn on Con Air: “Nic Cage is no longer an actor”
In the late Nineties, future war correspondent Sean Penn took umbrage at his former Racing with the Moon co-star Nicolas Cage, who Penn felt was selling his talent short by starring in so many big-budget action movies. “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He’s more like a performer,” claimed Penn, and he was widely thought to be referring to Cage’s prison plane caper Con Air when he said: “If there’s anything more disgusting in the movie business it’s the whoredom of my peers. It’s a guy’s arm coming out of the screen [and] jerking you off. I prefer to do it myself at home than have some guy contriving wet dreams for me.”
Burt Reynolds on Boogie Nights: “It made me very uncomfortable”
Appearing on Conan O’Brien’s talk show in 2018, Reynolds confirmed that he’d turned down the role of porn impresario Jack Horner a full seven times before finally acquiescing to appear in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 breakthrough Boogie Nights. He fired his agent shortly afterwards. He told O’Brien that the subject matter “made me very uncomfortable”, and when asked by the host if it was true he hated the experience so much he wanted to hit Anderson in the face, Reynolds corrected him. “No, I didn’t want to hit him in the face,” he said. “I just wanted to hit him.”
Ricky Gervais on The Tourist: “Everything this year was three-dimensional, except the characters in The Tourist.”
While hosting the Golden Globes in 2011 Gervais took the opportunity to poke fun at many of the assembled A-listers, most notably Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie for their poorly received thriller. “It was a big year for 3D movies — Toy Story, Despicable Me, Tron — seems like everything this year was three-dimensional, except the characters in The Tourist,” cracked Gervais, to a muted response. “I feel bad about that joke,” he went on. “I’ll tell you why, because I’m jumping on the bandwagon. I haven’t even seen The Tourist… Who has?”
Brian Cox on Pirates of the Caribbean: “Depp is so overblown”
Yet more criticism of Depp arrived earlier this year with the publication of Succession star Brian Cox’s memoir. In Putting The Rabbit In The Hat, Cox revealed he’d turned down the chance to play the Governor in Pirates of the Caribbean, a part which later went to Jonathan Pryce, and gave the film’s star the sort of dressing down Logan Roy would be proud of. “Another thing with Pirates of the Caribbean is that it’s very much the “Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow” show,” wrote Cox, “and Depp, personable though I’m sure he is, is so overblown, so overrated. I mean, Edward Scissorhands. Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face make-up, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t. And subsequently, he’s done even less.”
John Barrowman on Old: “Utter s****”
The films of M. Night Shyamalan can be an acquired taste, and it’s not one that Torchwood star Barrowman cares to indulge in. Last year he sparked a Twitter furore after telling his followers that not only did he not enjoy the director’s thriller about a mysterious beach that makes people age, he’d even gone as far as asking for his money back from the cinema. “What a waste of money and an utter s**** movie,” Barrowman wrote. “We get the metaphors but we still got a refund! We were so disappointed. Don’t waste your time or money going to see it.”
Peter Dinklage on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: “F****** backwards”
In a rare case of an actor taking aim at a film that hasn’t even be made yet, earlier this year Dinklage told WTF podcast host Marc Maron that he couldn’t believe Disney were forging ahead with a live-action version of Snow White with West Side Story breakout star Rachel Zegler in the titular role. “Literally no offense to anyone, but I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Dinklage said. “You’re progressive in one way, but then you’re still making that f****** backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f*** are you doing, man?”
Sam Elliott on The Power of the Dog: “That piece of s***”
It was also while talking to Maron on WTF that Elliott, currently appearing in Yellowstone prequel 1883, took aim at the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring Western. “You want to talk about that piece of s***?” he asked when the host brought the film up. Elliott went on to complain that Campion’s film made cowboys look like Chippendales, or as he put it: “those guys in New York who wear bowties and not much else… that’s what all these f***ing cowboys in that movie look like.” His complaints went on: “They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f***ing movie.” It was left to Maron to deliver the obvious rejoinder: “I think that’s what the movie’s about.”
