Movie stars won’t usually tell you what they really think about their careers, but if you catch them at the right moment they can be refreshingly blunt about the movies they made — and the ones they regret not doing! Here are 26 times movie stars were surprisingly candid about their careers:
1.
During a recent interview on Hot Ones, Macaulay Culkin revealed that he found an unread screenplay for Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in his house, and still can’t believe he missed it! The Home Alone star was on a break from acting back then and figured he was keeping up with submissions, but this one slipped through. His reaction now is part amused, part horrified: “I mean, I can’t imagine anyone but Schwartzman doing that part, but at the same time — oh, man, that would have been a ball and a biscuit, that one.” It’s an alternate timeline — with Culkin as Max Fischer — that underscores how easily a single unopened envelope can change a career.
2.
In the early 2010s, Guillermo del Toro was going to make a live-action version of Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson as Belle, but it never ended up happening. One of the reasons? He couldn’t find the right actor to play the Beast. Channing Tatum recently admitted that he was offered the role, but turned it down, saying, “I’d just had a baby, I was on a movie that was absolutely killing me, and the script wasn’t totally there yet. I was just in a place in my head that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this right now.'” Tatum is a major fan of del Toro, and now calls his choice “one of the biggest mistakes of my career,” adding that it could have been the “sickest movie ever.” Oh well. At least he said “yes” to G.I. Joe: Retaliation, lol.
3.
Speaking of Watson, she told Jimmy Kimmel about how — as a 10-year-old — director Chris Columbus called her out in front of everyone on the set of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for mouthing her costars’ lines. She said, “This is actually quite traumatic for me because I created issues because of this. I would ruin takes. Chris would be like, ‘Cut! Emma, you’re doing it again. You’re mouthing Dan’s lines.'” She added, “I was such a loser. I really loved those books, I really wanted to do my job well, and I kind of overdid it.”
4.
By the time she was 16, Drew Barrymore had already lived through more highs and lows than almost any kid her age, but then things got even weirder when she was cast in 1992’s erotic thriller Poison Ivy (yes, an erotic thriller…at 16…where she seduces her best friend’s dad. Yikes!). Not long after the movie came out, Barrymore said the movie transformed how the industry saw her. “Once people started seeing a little bit of footage, [my agent] J.J. got all these calls, like, ‘We’ve got this role for Drew as a Lolita-esque nymphet.’ And people were coming up to me on the set, going, ‘How does it feel to be a sex symbol?’ I was like, ‘Me?!’” Barrymore said she never viewed herself that way: “I might be a sensual person, but I don’t look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘Yeah, baby, you’ve got it goin’ on.’”
5.
On a 2023 episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast, Gwyneth Paltrow reflected on how winning the Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love affected her. “[When] you win the biggest prize, like, what are you supposed to do? It was hard, the amount of attention that you receive on a night like that and the weeks following.” Paltrow — who was just 26 when she won — called the experience “disorienting” and “really unhealthy,” adding, “I was like, ‘This is crazy. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which way is up.’ It was a lot.”
6.
Barry Keoghan revealed that the shocking scene in Saltburn where his character, Oliver, basically makes love to the soil around his lover Felix’s grave, was improvised. Asked about the improvised elements of the film on the red carpet of the 2024 Golden Globes, Keoghan joked that they’d improvised “all the sick parts.” He then went on to discuss the shocking grave sex scene.
7.
Earlier this year, with the sequel to 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada set to film, Kate Hudson confessed on Capital Breakfast that she turned down the role Anne Hathaway made famous. “That was a bad call,” Hudson, 45, said. “It was a timing thing, it was one of those things where I couldn’t do it, and I should’ve made it happen, and I didn’t. That was one where when I saw it I was like, ‘Ugh.'” She went on to say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Dunno, Kate. I think that’s just what we tell ourselves when we make epic mistakes, lol.
8.
Hudson may wake up in the night regretting her decision, but at least she doesn’t wake up regretting the awkward moment Anne Hathaway might…when she unnecessarily got naked on the set of Love & Other Drugs. You can forgive the awkward mistake — the film, costarring Jake Gyllenhaal, was a steamy affair. But showing up naked at work when you’re not supposed to is definitely a facepalm-worthy moment. It happened when rehearsing the scene where Hathaway removes her trench coat and is nude underneath. She told the Standard, “I thought we were filming, but it turned out we were just rehearsing, and I got unnecessarily naked in front of a lot of people. But hey, I just did my job.”
9.
Speaking of embarrassing on-set moments, The Hunger Games and Five Nights at Freddy’s star Josh Hutcherson told James Corden about “the most embarrassing moment of my entire life,” which happened while filming The Polar Express. “I was shooting this scene with Tom Hanks, who is like the father of America, and we’re shooting this scene…where I’m, like, nestled in under him…and I farted.” Yes, the then-9-year-old ripped one on Tom Hanks. But it gets worse. “Instead of playing it cool, Tom Hanks was like, ‘Whoa! What? Oh my god, this kid, what the heck!’ My first big movie. Tom Hanks! And I just farted in his face!”
10.
Matthew McConaughey shared an embarrassing on-set memory of his own while appearing on Variety’s Actors on Actors. He said he didn’t read the script before heading to the set of 1995’s Scorpion Spring, and upon arriving, learned that he was expected to immediately perform a four-page monologue…in Spanish. Why, you may ask, did McConaughey not read the script? “I had this idea that I needed to go back like I did in my first film (Dazed and Confused), where I just knew my man, and I would show up and just play the circumstances — improvise. So I said, ‘I’m not going to read the script. Just tell me the character, tell me the situation, and I’ll show up, and I’ll just react and do what I would do.'”
11.
Dave Franco probably regrets confessing his embarrassing on-set moment — when he discovered a giant pimple on his butt right before shooting his first-ever sex scene in the 2014 film Neighbors. “I was pretty nervous for the scene,” he told E!’s Chelsea Lately. “And then, of course, for me, I woke up that morning and I had a giant pimple on my ass…It sucks, right?” Franco then made the awkward decision to ask the makeup artist (who he’d just met) to cover it up. He later admitted, “That was not my finest hour.”
12.
It’s pretty common knowledge now that Will Smith turned down the lead role in The Matrix, but he recently told radio station Kiss Xtra that he also turned down a big part in another massive film. “I don’t think I’ve ever said it publicly,” Smith began, “but I am going to say it because we are opening up to one another. Chris Nolan brought me Inception first and I didn’t get it. I’ve never said that out loud. Now that I think about it, it’s those movies that go into those alternate realities… they don’t pitch well.” Damn. Passing on The Matrix and Inception? What a slap to the face.
13.
In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Mark Hamill admitted that he originally was leaning toward not returning as Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi: “You can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice — they should really focus on a new generation of characters.” However, when Harrison Ford signed on to reprise his iconic role, that changed things. “Once I saw in the press that he had accepted, I felt like I had been drafted — because if I’m the only one [of the original Star Wars heroes] who says no, I’ll be the most hated man in nerd-dom.” Somehow, Palp— I mean, Luke Skywalker, returned.
14.
In the same interview, Hamill also revealed that he asked Milos Forman, the director of 1984 Best Picture winner Amadeus, to be considered for the role of Mozart in the film, but was rebuffed. Hamill told the legendary director, “Milos, I played Amadeus on Broadway and in the national tour, and I was wondering if there was a chance you’d consider me for the part.” According to Hamill, Forman just laughed and replied, “‘No, no, no, because no one is to be believing that the Luke Spacewalker is the Mozart!’”
15.
This is probably as good a place as any to share that Al Pacino said last year that he was George Lucas’s original choice to play Han Solo in Star Wars, but turned it down despite being offered “so much money.” Speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Pacino dished, “I turned down Star Wars. When I first came up, I was the new kid on the block, you know what happens when you first become famous. It’s like, ‘Give it to Al.’ They’d give me Queen Elizabeth to play.” Pacino continued, “They gave me a script called Star Wars. … They offered me so much money. I don’t understand it. I read it. … So I said I couldn’t do it. I gave Harrison Ford a career.”
16.
At a 2023 Fan Fest in Chicago, Anthony Michael Hall confessed that — when he was 14 years old and playing Rusty in 1983’s Vacation — he tried to sneak on set to watch his on-screen mom Beverly D’Angelo film her nude scene. The embarrassing anecdote was first brought up by Hall’s on-screen sister in Vacation, Dana Barron, who played Audrey (leave it to a sister — real or on-screen — to bring up embarrassing stories from the past, LOL). Hall fessed up to it, saying, “Should I pick up the story right here? So, I got busted because I tried to sneak on to the set when Beverly was doing the shower scene.”
17.
This post has had a lot of actors regretting turning down roles, so we might as well have one more, right? In a recent Esquire interview, Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with director Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom he made the upcoming One Battle After Another. When Anderson asked Leo if he had any career regrets, he said, “My biggest regret is not doing Boogie Nights.” Boogie Nights, of course, was Anderson’s 1997 film about the lives of people making porn in L.A. during the ’70s. “It was a profound movie of my generation,” DiCaprio continued. “I can’t imagine anyone but Mark [Wahlberg] in it. When I finally got to see that movie, I just thought it was a masterpiece.” He then added, “It’s ironic that you’re the person asking that question, but it’s true.”
18.
Let’s go from Leo to Kate, shall we? Kate Winslet “burst a bubble” for people by speaking candidly about the making of the famous door scene in Titanic, saying that — while it looked like they were out on the ocean — it was filmed in a “waist-high” tank. Dishing the deets on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Winslet said, “It was waist-height, that tank. So first of all, I was regularly like, ‘Ugh, can I just go for a pee,’ and then I’d get up, get off the door, walk to the edge of the tank that was sort of 20 feet away, and I’d literally have to fling my leg over and climb out the tank and go for a pee and then come back and crawl on the door again.”
19.
Speaking to Variety for the film’s 30th anniversary of Pulp Fiction, Tim Roth confessed that Quentin Tarantino told him what was in the suitcase — something which movie fans have wondered about and debated for years. Roth said that because his character would know what was in the suitcase, Tarantino revealed to him the suitcase’s secret contents. “But,” Roth added, “Quentin asked me not to mention it.” (Feel free to yell, “God damn it!” and kick a chair, reader.)
20.
Meanwhile, at another 30th-anniversary screening of a 1994 classic, Speed, Keanu Reeves said that during filming the bus actually crashed into several real cars, eliciting screams from his costars and surprising Reeves, who said he was “under informed” about the production’s plans. Reeves asked Bullock (who was also at the screening), “Don’t you remember that day on the bus, though? When we were crashing through all the cars on the street? I remember we were a little under-informed. We were all on the bus and then we were driving down by San Diego or something. We were set by the ocean, and all of a sudden, we’re actually hitting cars. Boom! Boom! Everyone on their bus lost their mind. People were screaming.”
21.
Speaking at a Screen Talk at the BFI London Film Festival, Zoe Saldaña said she absolutely hated filming Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and that the bad experience almost made her “tip overboard.” Saldaña said the film’s cast and crew were “super marvelous” 99% of time. “But if the studio and the producers and the director, they’re not leading with kindness and awareness and consideration, then that big of a production can become a really bad experience and you may tip overboard. And I kind of did.” As a result, Saldaña decided not to return to the franchise for any further installments.
22.
Film anniversaries seem to be when stars spill the beans, and it was no different when the 20th anniversary of 2004’s critically-drubbed Catwoman came around. Halle Berry admitted to EW, “I always thought the idea of Catwoman saving women from a face cream felt a bit soft. All the other superheroes save the world; they don’t just save women from cracked faces. I always knew that was a soft superhero plight, but at that time in my career, I didn’t have the agency I have today or belief that I could challenge that, so I went along with it.” If you don’t know, the movie really is about Catwoman trying to stop a company from launching an anti-aging cream with a catch: it works, but it’s also addictive and, if you stop using it, your skin literally falls apart.
23.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Tom Cruise reflected on getting to work with old friend Val Kilmer one more time in Top Gun: Maverick. He said, “That was pretty emotional, I’ve known Val for decades. For him to come back and play that character…he’s such a powerful actor that he instantly became that character again…you’re looking at Iceman.” Cruise continued, “I was crying, I got emotional.”
24.
Ben Stiller told USA Today that, as a young actor, he yelled “Cut!” after screwing up a line on the set of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. If you don’t know, there’s probably no bigger faux pas you can commit on a movie set than yelling “Cut!” if you’re not the director. After that, “I hear this huge silence. Steven Spielberg is in another building watching on the monitors, and he yells: ‘What happened?’ I’m like, ‘I just yelled cut because I screwed up,’ and he’s yelling, ‘No, no, you never cut!’ I literally turned white and shrunk because my hero and idol, Steven Spielberg, is yelling at me.” Stiller says he has since laughed about the moment with Spielberg (who, of course, remembers it).
25.
Julianne Moore told Andy Cohen the details of a very unexpected event — getting fired from Can You Ever Forgive Me? by director Nicole Holofcener just six days before filming was scheduled to start. “I didn’t leave that movie, I was fired. Yeah, yeah, Nicole fired me. So yeah, that’s the truth. I think she didn’t like what I was doing. I think that her idea of where the character was was different than where my idea of where the character was, and so she fired me.” She went on to say she hasn’t seen the movie “because it’s still kind of painful,” then summed the situation up with: “It’s pretty bad. The only other time I was fired was when I was working at a yogurt stand when I was 15. So yeah, it felt bad.”
26.
Lastly, Mrs. Doubtfire director Chris Columbus told Entertainment Weekly that star Robin Williams did so much improvising — often venturing into inappropriate territory — that he could easily make an R-rated cut of the movie. “There was a deal between Robin and myself, which was, he’ll do one or two, three scripted takes, and then he would say, ‘Then let me play.’ And we would basically go on anywhere between 15 to 22 takes, I think 22 being the most I remember. He would sometimes go into territory that wouldn’t be appropriate for a PG-13 movie, but certainly appropriate and hilariously funny for an R-rated film.”