10 actors who hated working with CGI
As the film industry progressed alongside technological and scientific innovation, several productions began to lean into the realm of CGI and green screen. There’s undoubtedly an advantage to using these techniques, but it also invariably leads to cinema with a lower quality and atmosphere of reality.
The franchise-heavy world of modern cinema, dominated by Hollywood studios and endless superhero movies, sequels and remakes, feels like it has become a pale imitation of the ages of the film medium gone by, and while the likes of The Matrix et al. are certainly impressive from a visual perspective, there seems to be an overreliance on CGI itself.
It’s also fair to say that not every actor is completely enamoured with having to star in movies that rely heavily on CGI. After all, standing in front of a green screen for hours on end is diametrically opposed to the very nature of acting, through which performers long to show their deepest talents.
We’ve compiled a list of actors who have expressed their dismay at having to feature in movies that have gone heavy on the CGI and green screen. From one of the most iconic turns as a wizard of all time to some of the world’s most beloved movie franchises, let’s dive into the world of computer imagery, all for the worst.
10 actors who hated working with CGI:
Ian McKellen
There’s no doubt that Sir Ian McKellen loved performing in his iconic role as Gandalf the Grey Wizard in Peter Jackson’s legendary The Lord of the Rings trilogy from the early 2000s. However, when he returned for Jackson’s The Hobbit movies, he found the director had begun to rely on green screen production rather than shooting on location.
This decision seemed to irritate the acting hero, widely considered one of the greatest of his generation and new CGI technology was diametrically opposed to his performative style. “If Gandalf was on top of a mountain, I’d be there on the mountain,” McKellen had later said, pointing out the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings and the lesser quality of The Hobbit.
Idris Elba
When Idris Elba signed up to star in Thor: The Dark World, directed by Alan Taylor, he was not ready for the uncomfortable process of dangling in a harness for a sequence that used a green screen. Speaking to The Telegraph, he discussed his negative experience of shooting the scene.
“I’m actually falling down from a spaceship, so they had to put me in harness in this green-screen studio. And in between takes I was stuck there, fake hair stuck onto my head with glue, this fucking helmet, while they reset,” he explained. Referring to his role in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, he added, “I’m thinking: ‘24 hours ago, I was Mandela.’ Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”
Johnny Depp
Throughout his career, Johnny Depp has proven to be a resilient energy, as captured in the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean. However, when Depp was hired as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, he found that the experience of constantly being surrounded by green screen eventually wore him down.
Depp called Alice in Wonderland “exhausting” and pointed out the fact that he’d much rather give in to the demands of shooting on location, “spew[ing] dialogue while having to step over dolly track while some guy is holding a card,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph. Burton’s CGI-heavy fantasy left Depp feeling beaten up and “befuddled” in contrast.
Kit Harrington
Game of Thrones became one of the biggest television phenomenons when it first aired in 2011. The combination of battles, sex, dragons and various other mythical creatures had millions hooked, with Kit Harrington rising to prominence as Jon Snow. Unsurprisingly, the show relies on CGI to generate dragons, but Harrington struggled to get on board with filming scenes which required him to pretend he was riding one of the fantastical creatures by sitting on an uncomfortable rig.
He told The Hollywood Reporter, “It was horrific. It’s not acting at all. It is not acting, it never will be acting, and it is not what I’d signed up for. It is very uncomfortable as a man.”
Daniel Radcliffe
There’s a fair share of on-location production in the Harry Potter movies, which does tend to lend them an air of reality, even amid the constant magical fantasy. However, when it came to the quidditch scenes, the actors involved had to be put on moving pedestals, which jerked around violently in front of a blue screen.
Daniel Radcliffe did not enjoy this experience at all and called the quidditch scenes the “least fun things” that he’d had to do across the entire film series. “It’s not a pleasant experience, it does hurt quite a lot, and it is not something I would be rushing back to do,” he once noted, and unfortunately for Radcliffe, Harry Potter had played the fictional wizard’s sport for most of the movies.
Donald Glover
The multi-talented Donald Glover, equally loved for his acting roles and his music, released under the name Childish Gambino, has his reservations regarding the use of CGI techniques like face scanning. He appeared in the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018, which left him with worries about how his likeness would be used in the future. Several Star Wars actors have been recreated through CGI before, such as the late Carrie Fisher.
Glover explained to The New Yorker, “I’m scanned into Star Wars now, my face and body.”
He added, “Who’s to say that at some point they won’t take that scan and say, ‘Let’s make another movie with Donald. He’s been dead for fifteen years but we can do whatever we want with him.’”
Hugh Grant
In Paul King’s Wonka, Hugh Grant’s turn as an Oompa Loompa was somewhat celebrated. However, it appears that the actor actually thoroughly disliked performing in the role, which was produced with a mixture of animation, multi-camera and motion capture, and he called the entire experience “very uncomfortable”.
Grant’s effort had also been criticised by some circles, who pointed out that he is an able-bodied actor playing a dwarf character. Grant noted that he “hated the whole thing”, never knowing whether he should act with his body or just his face and admitting that he only agreed to take on the job because he wanted the money.
Jessica Chastain
Donald Glover isn’t the only one to express a distaste for face scanning, with Jessica Chastain also revealing that she was subjected to the technology without knowing much about it. These days, Hollywood’s propensity for using CGI to replicate actors’ faces and bodies without their permission or after they’ve passed away is becoming more common – and concerning.
Chastain told Vulture that during a project which she did not name, “They took me into a room. They scanned my face. Then they asked me to smile, to frown.” Confused and suspicious, the actor refused. “I said no. I just didn’t know how they were going to use it.”
Ewan McGregor
When the Star Wars prequel movies came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, George Lucas was keen to push the new technology that had been made since the original trilogy. The prequels are laden with CGI and green screen, and for this reason, Ewan McGregor, who played a young Obi-Wan Kenobi, found them “difficult to make”.
“[George] wanted to max out that technology, but that meant for us that we were very much on blue screens and green screens, and it was hard work,” McGregor noted. Not only that, but all the hard effort that McGregor and his co-stars put into the prequel films was largely undone by the film’s poor reception, making the CGI issues a double wounder.
Stanley Tucci
Stanley Tucci has starred in multiple movies featuring CGI, from the box office bomb Jack the Giant Slayer to the hugely popular dystopian movie The Hunger Games. Yet, he has admitted that he isn’t actually too keen on the filming process when it comes to working with CGI, telling the BBC that having to wear spandex and tight outfits for 3D scenes was “humiliating.”
He added, “I can’t stand 3D, I really can’t. I’m happy to go watch it but I don’t work shooting in 3D. It’s not fun.” A few years later, an appearance on the Off Menu podcast led him to reveal that he also finds working with CGI confusing, explaining, “I never quite know what I’m doing.”
