Don’t get me wrong. I love Keanu Reeves. He’s an awesome guy and a great actor, but his performance in Dracula? Weird doesn’t even begin to touch on how truly bizarre it was. We all learned he couldn’t do an English accent.
Wynona Rider does the same crap, and since she was in the film, I’d argue that she gave him some “tips.” Next to Gary Oldman, Reeves looked like he was just out of his league. The movie could’ve been something, but this miscast ruined it.
I get their mindset (sort of). Topher Grace was famous in That ’70s Show, so that kind of translates, right? No. No, it doesn’t. Throw whoever thought of doing this out the window. They don’t deserve a job. Topher Grace doesn’t have the gravitas for this role.
Couple that with the fact that Venom is possibly one of the best villains in the Spiderman Universe (other than Carnage, of course), and you’ve really screwed the pooch. Apparently, Sam Raimi didn’t even want to focus on Venom, which could be why they messed him up so bad. His choice? Sandman.
Jesse Eisenberg? We’re talking about the awkward, stammering guy that talks superfast? Yeah, that’s the ideal choice for the suave Lex Luthor. Eisenberg is clearly trying to get out of his “typecast” role, but he needs some better acting chops before he does that.
Honestly, maybe he wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if they just created a character for him. Who’s to say that he had to be an iconic villain? Make him one of Lex’s underlings or something. Whatever. Zack Snyder definitely learned his lesson here.
It was honestly hard to pick one actor from this movie to fit for “worst.” For those curious, Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer – still can’t believe he was an honest cast choice – are up there. Still, Colin Farrell was the main actor, the titular character.
Not only did he look nothing like Alexander the Great, but he also looked awful with blonde hair. Casting Angelina was a poor decision as well because she was only a year older than Colin. That means they had to cast someone older for the mom or younger for Alexander. Hmm…nah. Let’s roll with this weird Oedipus dynamic.
The thing with this movie is that we’ve seen an actor play Matt Murdock wonderfully – Charlie Cox in the TV series. Granted, we didn’t have the series at the time to compare to, but even still, we knew that Ben Affleck wasn’t the one.
Ben Affleck apparently hates the movie as much as we do, but he didn’t admit that he was a wrong pick for Murdock. The whole time he’s in the movie, he just kind of stands there with his mouth half-open (when he’s not stalking Elektra, anyway). The only thing I wish is that Affleck kept his promise to be done with superhero movies.
This one might ruffle a few feathers, but I honestly don’t care. Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is beyond offensive. They literally picked a white guy to play a Japanese character, and they made him look stereotypically Asian and offensively yellow face. Awful. Just awful.
Rooney personified Asian propaganda from WWII. The worst part is that there was no reason he had to be Japanese or Asian at all. He could have stayed white. It wasn’t like being Japanese was super essential to the character.
Nicolas Cage badly wants to be this bad guy. Check out all of the films he’s made in the past (and flopped). Because they picked him for Ghost Rider, it effectively put a nail in the character’s coffin. No one saw him as Johnny Blaze.
The “coolness” he tried to bring to the character failed miserably. The point of Blaze is that he’s an effortlessly cool miscreant. The worst part of it all is that Marvel wants to keep Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider. If they do that, I riot.
Two Coppola’s on the list! Imagine that. Sofia Coppola was bad for a sad reason – she had no training and no expertise. Pair this next to Godfather’s legendary cast, and she’s going to be doomed. Critics even called her “hopelessly amateurish.”
The fact of the matter is that she got the role because her papa was directing. Ultimately, it caused his daughter to have a hard time in her acting career or whatever you’d call her on-screen appearances throughout history. The choice of casting her and the acting was frankly embarrassing, and it stains Godfather III.
I don’t want to focus on the mullet, but it does need to be addressed. It’s like the herd of elephants in the room. Next is his accent. Since we all know what a terrible English accent can do to a movie, I’m glad he didn’t half-heartedly try an English accent.
Anyone else remember the line, “this is English courage,” said in his California accent? Um…lol what? The film was honestly doomed from the start with conflicts and too many cuts, but that’s no excuse. Maybe my hopes are high after Cary Elwes’s Robin Hood but come on.
Hollywood has been slammed time and time again for whitewashing in movies, and Aloha is a painful reminder. Emma Stone’s role was that of Allison Ng, who is a quarter Asian and a quarter Hawaiian. Could they have chosen anyone whiter than Emma Stone? She practically glows in the dark.
Everyone involved apologized, including Emma Stone and the director. Sandra Oh had a pretty good roast during the 2019 Golden Globes, saying Crazy Rich Asians was the first studio film “with an Asian American lead since Ghost in the Shell and Aloha.” Hilariously, Emma Stone yells, “I’m sorry!” That’s pretty much everything you need to know about this pick.
Bond women only have one real requirement: to be hot. There are very few films in the franchise where the women are strong or smart versus just hot. The movies appeal to a very specific demographic – one that agrees with Sean Connery’s thoughts on women.
Enter Denise Richards as “Dr.” Christmas Jones, whose very name is a sexual innuendo. She’s supposed to be a nuclear physicist, but she seems as though she got her degree from a Wikipedia page (if it had been around then). On top of that, she wears the tightest clothing imaginable, making her entire role a parody of nuclear physicists.
Oh, hey! Another example of Hollywood choosing the worst possible cast for a person of color. Who would have guessed this to happen? Unsurprisingly, this movie was bad since they cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan.
What is a little surprising is that the whole movie was a terrible decision. They filmed it downwind from a nuclear test site, and over 90 people who were on set ended up with cancer. Since it was a pretty bad movie with an awful whitewashing decision, it sucks these people died for it.
First of all, the decision to sing the entirety of Les Miserable wasn’t the best. The only question I have: Was this decided before or after Russell Crowe was cast? It wasn’t like he played a small role either. Russell Crowe proved that not everyone can sing, and we all suffered for it.
The movie itself wasn’t bad, but listening to Russell Crowe’s terrible, hoarse yowling was one of the worst parts. The most obvious thing to look for in a musical is someone that can carry a tune. Thankfully, Javert died before the film went on too long.
Did you forget about this atrocity? Vince Vaughn isn’t really a great actor, to begin with. He can really only do fast-talking comedy where he plays an absolute idiot. To be fair, Vince Vaughn was still trying to figure himself out at the time, but Norman Bates isn’t the time to “find yourself.”
The film had already been done in the past by Alfred Hitchcock, one of the best horror/thriller directors of all time. It set Vaughn up for failure from the get-go. Thankfully, most people forgot that the 1998 version of Psycho even exists.
Bat nipples. Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, we can talk about the acting in this movie. Yes, it’s one of the worst Batman movies ever made, and I’m including all the remakes up until now. One of the issues was the choice of actors.
George Clooney as Batman? Batman is so grim that his smile is just a lesser frown, and they decided to cast the forever-charismatic George Clooney in this role? This, in accompaniment with all the product pushing, makes it clear that Batman & Robin was nothing more than a shameless cash grab.
Johnny Depp is the number one actor that’s supposed to wear something crazy and put on a ton of makeup. That doesn’t necessarily mean it should be him. For movies like Edward Scissorhands, it worked because the character wasn’t a person of color.
The Lone Ranger? Yeah, not so much. Another case of whitewashing by Hollywood. Native American actors could have cast for the role, and they would have done a much better job. Depp claimed it was a message to kids on reservations, but that changes nothing.
Ronda Rousey is supposedly a good fighter (I have no dog in that fight, so to speak), but she isn’t a good actor. Her whole persona is built off of her attitude, but that attitude is off-putting. They tried to work with that in Furious 7, but it was appalling at best.
Her role was obviously just cast because they wanted to bank off of her being the “girl of the moment.” The only time she’s on-screen, she just stands around in a ballgown looking angry. Then she gets in one little fight and disappears for the rest of the movie. Lame.
No matter how good your movie is, whitewashing will always stain what “could’ve been.” Fans were excited to hear about a live-action movie for Ghost in the Shell, but their hopes and dreams were quickly dashed when ScarJo was cast for the role.
Fans were so angry that they started a petition, claiming plenty of other people could fulfill the role – they were right. Those involved with the film moved forward, and it landed dead on its butt. When will Hollywood learn?
This is one of the worst film casting choices on the list in terms of whitewashing. Laurence Olivier was cast as Othello, a character described as a dark-skinned “Moor” in the play. There were undoubtedly skilled black actors that could have cast.
A person of color has played Othello in the past, and they were fantastic. This portrayal? It was just plain offensive. He even acted it out like he was in some kind of Minstrel traveling show. Saying it’s a “product of its time” doesn’t work because it came out in ’65!
I’ll give you that Ashton Kutcher looked almost exactly like Steve Jobs when he was younger. With his appearance out of the way, we can get onto the real meat of the problem: Ashton Kutcher sucks at acting.
His entire career has been made up of nothing but an adult man acting like he just turned 13. We’re talking about a dude who was on Punk’d until 2007 and the reboot in 2012. He was 34 in 2012. Even if you claim he’s been “typecast,” there’s a reason for that. He’s playing himself, which is not Steve Jobs.
Sue me, but I hate Tom Cruise. The only thing he was actually good in was Risky Business, Jerry McGuire, and Mission Impossible, the latter of which seems like it was actually made for him. The Mummy? Terrible. Edge of Tomorrow? Somehow worse. Knight and Day? Ugh.
It’s not a huge surprise that he’s been making action movies that are eerily similar to Mission Impossible. Why does he suck? He doesn’t even act. He just makes a stupid face at the camera and looks cut up. Anyone can do that. A cat can do that. Can Scientology explain that?
I want to love Kristen Wiig in anything she does. I’m sure she’s a great actor, but right now, she’s a comedian. There were a million things wrong with WW84, but a huge glaring one was Kristen Wiig as Cheetah.
Cheetah is supposed to be the Joker to Wonder Woman’s Batman. She’s supposed to be this deadly archvillain that could destroy Diana, but nah. She was Kristen Wiig. Replacing her wouldn’t have saved the movie from that awful ending, but it would’ve been a little better.
I personally think that Jake Gyllenhaal is a great actor. His performance in Nightcrawler and Spider-Man was superb. That doesn’t change the fact that he shouldn’t have been in Prince of Persia. Someone of Iranian descent should have performed the role.
The movie itself wasn’t utterly awful, which makes it even more of a shame. It was supposed to be launched into a full-on franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean. Then it was whitewashed and flopped at the box office. Even Gyllenhaal regrets taking the role today.
I want Cameron Diaz to do well in her life, but she isn’t exactly the most skilled actor out there. In Gangs of New York, she was cast alongside Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio – two of the greatest actors that have ever lived.
That, unfortunately, made Diaz’s acting seem that much worse. The most egregious offense is that she can’t do an Irish accent to save her life. She also can’t carry a dramatic role like Carey Mulligan, who is of British and Irish descent.
This seems a little unfair because Jessica Alba was very clearly chosen simply due to her looks. The issue with this is that Jessica Alba can be a pretty good actor, so casting her as someone that was just supposed to smile and look pretty didn’t make much sense.
Alba stated that her portrayal as Sue Storm made her want to quit acting. The director, Tim Story, told her that her crying looked too real and ugly. He asked her to cry pretty. This is when you hire a model, Tim – is Denise Richards available?
Rihanna is an amazing artist, but that sadly doesn’t translate into acting – or at least that was the case in Battleship. She was so bad that she won a Golden Raspberry (aka a Razzie) for the role, and we can see why.
I’m not going to say that if Rihanna wasn’t in the film, it would’ve been good. Oh, no, no, no. The movie was hot garbage, but Rihanna should never have chosen it as her acting debut. Maybe try something like Ocean’s 8 next time.
I’m not going to beat up on Jared Leto’s Joker. The Suicide Squad had too many things wrong with it to make it a good movie. Jared Leto’s role as the infamous clown was…interesting. And that’s why it was such an odd (or bad) casting choice.
Leto leaned way too heavily into the insane Joker than anything else. Sure, Joker is a little whacky, but he’s smart – very smart. There’s a reason he stays one step ahead of Bats, and this guy? Nah, he wouldn’t have made it. It wasn’t the Joker we all know and love.
This one is a little biased for an obvious reason. When I was young, I watched Aladdin, and Genie was the best character in the whole shebang. What made Genie so great? None other than Robin freaking Williams. He gave Genie everything he needed to be a bigger-than-life character.
Skip ahead to the live remake – which never should have happened in the first place – and Will Smith was cast. Are you kidding me? Honestly, no one could have done as well as Robin Williams, but Will Smith’s ridiculousness was far too over the top. That says a lot.
So, let me ask you this. What movies do you know Jack Black from? School of Rock, Nacho Libre, Jumanji? Not King Kong. The reason for that is because Jack Black plays a fun, crazy dude. It’s a character he’s perfected since the creation of Tenacious D in 1994.
In no way does that translate to his role in King Kong. Instead of being a silly dude, he was a dramatic character. It was beyond distracting. He couldn’t pull it off. Next time, Jack Black should definitely stick with what he’s good at.
This is one of the most offensive choices on the list. Tiptoes is about a guy who gets his fiancée pregnant, and he’s forced to tell her that the rest of his family has dwarfism. Gary Oldman is one of the little people. I’m sure you can guess why it’s offensive, but it gets worse.
Peter Dinklage was also in the movie! Is anyone else as confused as I am? Dinklage is an amazing actor, so why choose Gary Oldman? It’s honestly excruciating to watch this movie because it comes off silly at best and disgustingly offensive at worst.
