Just because an actor stars in a movie doesn't mean they have to stand by it—especially once the obligatory promo tour is over. Many actors have shared after the fact that they're actually ashamed of movies they starred in, whether it was because they didn't like their performance, didn't care for their role, or simply felt like the overall result was a dud. Some of the stars who have spoken out about being embarrassed by their films were in sequels that disappointed them, while others thought they'd be bringing something new to a character only to watch it all crash and burn. Read on to learn about six films their stars don't have any trouble bad-mouthing in the press.
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1 | Batman & Robin
George Clooney has poked fun at his stint as Batman several times over the years. The actor starred as the superhero in 1997's Batman & Robin, which was not well received. During a 2015 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, he said, "I always apologize for Batman & Robin … I actually thought that I destroyed the franchise until they brought it back. Somebody else brought it back years later and changed it. But I thought at the time, This is going to be a very good career movie. It wasn’t."
Clooney also said he doesn't want his wife, Amal Clooney, or their children to watch the film. "There are certain films I just go, ‘I want my wife to have some respect for me,'" he told Variety in 2012. Of whether their kids will ever see it, he added, "It’s bad when your four-year-old kid goes, ‘This sucks.’ That could be painful."
2 | Catwoman
Clooney is far from the only actor to have regrets about taking on a DC Comics role. In 2004, Halle Berry starred in Catwoman. The movie was almost universally panned and Berry won a Razzie Award for Worst Actress, which she accepted in-person while holding the Best Actress Oscar she was awarded for Monster's Ball in 2002. After feigning excitement at winning the Razzie, she said, "First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of [expletive], god-awful movie. It was just what my career needed. I was at the top and then Catwoman just plummeted me to the bottom."
That said, while Berry doesn't like the movie, she doesn't regret doing it. "While it failed to most people, it wasn't a failure for me because I met so many interesting people that I wouldn't have met otherwise, I learned two forms of martial arts and I learned not what to do," Berry said at the Matrix Awards in 2018, as reported by Glamour. She added that she made "a [expletive]-load of money that changed my life."
3 | Australia
In 2008, Nicole Kidman starred in Baz Luhrmann's Australia alongside Hugh Jackman. The film incorporates historical events that took place in the country during the early 1940s.
Kidman revealed during an interview with an Australian radio station that she didn't feel "proud" of the epic after seeing the premiere.
"I can't look at this movie and be proud of what I've done," she said (via The Sydney Morning Herald). "I sat there, and I looked at [husband] Keith [Urban] and went, 'Am I any good in this movie?' But I thought Brandon Walters and Hugh Jackman were wonderful. It's just impossible for me to connect to it emotionally at all."
That said, Kidman also shared that she doesn't usually watch her own films, because it makes her so uncomfortable. She said she even left the country after the premiere, because she didn't want to know what people thought. "We ran because I didn't want to read anything. I didn't want to know," she said. "I saw my sister and my family and we saw Keith's family and then we were straight on a plane."
4 | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Daniel Radcliffe starred as Harry Potter in eight book-to-film adaptations, but he wasn't happy with his performance in one of them.
In 2014, he told the Daily Mail that it was "hard" to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth movie in the franchise, "because I’m just not very good in it. I hate it." He explained, "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. My best film is the fifth one [Order Of The Phoenix] because I can see a progression."
5 | Speed 2
Speed, the action movie starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, still has a lot of fans today. Speed 2: Cruise Control? Not so much. And Bullock is "embarrassed" that she returned for the sequel. (Reeves, on the other hand, did not take part.)
In 2022, TooFab asked Bullock whether she had a movie she was embarrassed she was in but came around to after it was "embraced by fans." She responded, "You stumped me with the ‘fans coming around later on.’ I have one that no one came around to, and I'm still embarrassed I was in. It's called Speed 2. I've been very vocal about it. Makes no sense. Slow boat. Slowly going towards an island."
The interviewer then said they were a fan of the movie as a 12-year-old. "That's one I wished I hadn't done, and no fans came around, that I know of, except for you," Bullock said.
6 | Passengers
Jennifer Lawrence recently revealed that a famous friend advised her not to accept a movie role and that she regrets not doing as she said.
In a 2022 interview with The New York Times, Lawrence said that singer Adele told her she shouldn't do the 2016 sci-fi movie Passengers. The Oscar-winner co-starred with Chris Pratt in the film about two travelers on a spaceship who are awoken from hibernation 90 years earlier than they're meant to.
"Adele told me not to do it!" Lawrence said. "She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.' I should have listened to her."
In a previous interview with Vanity Fair in 2021, Lawrence said about her movies around the time of Passengers, "I was not pumping out the quality that I should have."
