10 actors who get worse with every performance
The true sign of a talented actor is someone who can improve.
Acting is a form of art that comes natural to some, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also require hard work. Even if there are some iconic stars who seem to have been given a gift, it still requires rigour and research to give a strong performance. There are some actors who took many years in order to figure themselves out and have made improvements for the better.
It would be shocking to suggest back in 2008 that Robert Pattinson would become one of the best actors working today, but he managed to completely rebuild his career in the aftermath of The Twilight Saga. On the flipside, there are some actors so devoid of talent that their careers can’t get much worse. While Vin Diesel continues to be in terrible films, it’s hard to say that his performances have gotten any worse over time.
Most actors have some sort of career fluctuations when they weave in and out of doing quality work. John Travolta has seemingly had more career dips and comebacks than any other actor, resulting in a wide variety of quality within his body of work. There are also actors who have made a strong comeback that they seem to be riding high on, such as the great work that Demi Moore has been doing after earning her first Academy Award nomination for The Substance.
Unfortunately, there are some stars who have gotten lazier with each performance and haven’t given any indication that they’ll be putting in more effort anytime soon.
10 actors turning in increasingly worse performances
Cuba Gooding Jr
The 1990s were a strange time in which there were some truly strange Oscar wins, and none have aged quite as poorly as Cuba Gooding Jr’s ‘Best Supporting Actor’ win for Jerry Maguire. Even when ignoring the fact that there’s no way that Gooding deserved to win over Edward Norton in Primal Fear or William H Macy in Fargo, his career seemed to take an immediate downward spiral.
Gooding failed to be a prestige actor with embarrassing Oscar-bait roles like Men of Honor and Radio, and spent a period of time being in awful comedies like Norbit, Snow Dogs, and Daddy Day Camp. In recent years, he’s had to settle for smaller roles and still hasn’t earned much praise; while he played the titular role in FX’s American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson, Gooding felt miscast in an ensemble that was otherwise flawless.
Chris Pratt
Chris Pratt seemed like he was changing the type of leading man Hollywood was seeking with his performance in Guardians of the Galaxy, which offered the perfect blend of Harrison Ford-esque swagger and Bill Murray-esque humour. Unfortunately, Pratt has seemingly lost his ability to laugh at himself by embracing hyper-masculine military heroes, resulting in boring performances in The Terminal List, The Tomorrow War, and Mercy.
Rarely have the two leads of a major blockbuster had less chemistry than Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the Jurassic World films, and he’s no longer showing up for small parts in films like Zero Dark Thirty, Moneyball, or Her. Now that he has signed himself on to multiple animated franchises where he gives the laziest voiceover performances imaginable, it’s beginning to feel like his brilliance as Peter Quill was an anomaly that can’t be replicated.
Kate McKinnon
Saturday Night Live has a long history of providing a platform for future movie stars, and the 21st century saw people like Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Tina Fey making the jump. Kate McKinnon has been in some of the funniest Saturday Night Live sketches of all time, but her movie career has never taken off. The 2016 Ghostbusters reboot caused a whole lot of pointless controversy, but McKinnon’s aggressively obnoxious performance simply didn’t work, regardless of what other issues the film faced.
Between generic comedies like The Spy Who Dumped Me, The Bubble, Masterminds, and Sisters, McKinnon has never been able to develop a real character who exists beyond the confines of a sketch. She hasn’t been able to make the leap into more dramatic acting either, as her performance in this year’s science fiction drama In the Blink of an Eye was an embarrassing misfire.
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp’s name will ignite controversy whenever it is brought up, when it comes to his supporters and critics arguing over the controversial legal proceedings with his ex-wife, Amber Heard, but the reality is that his career has been in a downward spiral for the last 15 years.
Depp became so enamoured by dressing up in elaborate costumes and wearing makeup that there’s none of the integrity of Ed Wood or Edward Scissorhands left in him; even the most vehement Depp defender can’t claim to have watched Mortdecai, Transcendence, and Alice Through The Looking Glass and claim that he hasn’t been phoning it in.
Depp’s banishment in Hollywood hasn’t led him to any artistic comebacks either, as he’s spent the last decade being in pretentious slop like Minamata and Jeanne du Barry. While he’s starring in this year’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, it remains to be seen if it has his full effort.
Orlando Bloom
Orlando Bloom had a remarkable string of luck when he was cast in two of the biggest franchises of all time with The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean, and he admittedly did a great job with the roles of Legolas and Will Turner, respectively. Unfortunately, Bloom seemed to blow his run with disastrous performances in the medieval epics Troy and Kingdom of Heaven, which were otherwise well-reviewed and well-acted films.
Bloom’s attempts to be a romantic star didn’t work out either, as Elizabethtown proved that he didn’t have the generational charisma needed to be the lead of a Cameron Crowe film. Although a vast majority of Bloom’s recent work has been in direct-to-VOD B-movies, his occasional appearances in bigger films haven’t indicated any signs of improvement; he even felt out of place when returning to the role of Legolas for The Hobbit trilogy.
Richard Dreyfuss
There were several decades in which Richard Dreyfuss was considered to be one of the greatest living actors, as the ‘70s saw him starring in such classics as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, American Graffiti, and The Goodbye Girl, which made him the youngest ‘Best Actor’ winner in the history of the Oscars, until Adrien Brody’s win for The Pianist. While Dreyfuss continued to do solid comedy work and fun supporting roles throughout the ‘90s, he hasn’t given a good performance since Mr Holland’s Opus in 1995.
Between phoned-in supporting roles, cheap cameos in B-movies, disastrous comedies, and multiple ‘grumpy old man’ roles, Dreyfuss has managed to destroy any goodwill that he had. The fact that he is regarded as difficult to work with isn’t even a good excuse anymore; other supposedly ‘difficult’ actors, such as Dustin Hoffman, have still been giving respectable performances in their twilight years.
Roberto Benigni
Hollywood will occasionally fall over itself trying to award an international star, and the industry was apparently so caught up by Italian cinema that it decided to proclaim Roberto Benigni, a generational talent.
Life is Beautiful, which Begnini both directed and starred in, has become a more divisive film, but his performance works for what the intentions were. He hasn’t been able to capture that same magic since, and it was only five years after winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ that he gave a performance in Pinocchio that was so detestable that he essentially got banished from the industry.
Benigni has been much quieter ever since, but will occasionally pop up in paycheck roles, including doing vocal work for VeggieTales, and based on how misguided his performance in the Woody Allen film To Rome With Love was, it would be surprising if he got any more work.
Shia LaBeouf
Shia LaBeouf has become a complete laughingstock, but there was a time when he was considered to be a promising actor, able to go method for Fury, play a prestige role in A Guide To Recognising Your Saints, and even capable of taking a look at his own past in the semi-autobiographical (if largely fictionalised) drama Honey Boy.
Beyond the allegations of abuse and plagiarism that have been levelled against him, LaBeouf has become such a toxic presence that he’s become incapable of delivering a committed performance. He got on the bad side of Francis Ford Coppola while filming Megalopolis through his constant complaining, and gave a performance so unhinged in David Ayer’s The Tax Collector that the film remained in limbo for years because no distributor would dare go anywhere near it.
James Franco
James Franco is another actor whose ‘cancellation’ (even if he never totally disappeared) happened after a period in which he was already declining in popularity, and while it would be easy to point to his strong performances in The Disaster Artist and Spring Breakers, they represent a small portion of his output. Franco had a workaholic streak in which he was writing, directing, and starring in multiple films each year that never received any sort of release or distribution, and would only occasionally pop up to phone in performances in Queen of the Desert and Why Him?
Franco’s obsession with quantity over quality resulted in a stretch of time in which none of his work had any lasting impact, and his appearances in ‘real films’, such as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Palo Alto, feel like they could have just as easily gone to a different actor.
Ariana DeBose
The role of Anita in West Side Story became one of three characters in history to win two Academy Awards, following Michael Corleone and the Joker. Rita Moreno’s performance in the 1961 classic changed the industry, but Ariana DeBose added new layers to the character in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake, which ended up being the better overall film.
It felt like the announcement of someone who could be the Moreno of her day, but DeBose’s filmography ever since has been absolutely pitiful. Not only are Argylle, Kraven the Hunter, Love Hurts, and ISS terrible films, but ones where she adds absolutely nothing and has zero presence. In less than five years since West Side Story made its theatrical debut, DeBose has gone from winning prizes to being the fourth lead on a Prime Video streaming mystery show with Nicole Kidman.
