10 actors who killed their careers with one movie
Being a part of the Hollywood machine is something that many of us would cut off our little fingers for, but the industry isn’t all glittery parties and eternal happiness; the world of acting is a tough environment to thrive in. Indeed, the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have only succeeded due to a carefully pruned public persona, choosing their roles with the utmost care and precision.
But the world of Hollywood is a fickle place to be; one day, you might be the hottest property, and the next, you may be shunned to the side to make room for the next new burgeoning prospect. On the other side of the coin, there are countless stars who have saved their careers with just one movie, with the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Robert Downey Jr going from zero to hero overnight.
Looking into the poor actors who did the opposite and went from hero to zero, this list will look at the ten actors who killed their careers with one movie. Whether they took on roles that would go on to be box office catastrophes or they would simply become typecasts for the movie that made them a sensation, these actors got on the wrong end of Hollywood success.
Take a look at the list below, which includes such Hollywood icons as Sofia Coppola, Mike Myers, Jaden Smith and Demi Moore.
10 actors who killed their careers:
10. Elizabeth Berkley – Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
You might think that starring in the new movie from Dutch provocateur and movie-making extraordinaire Paul Verhoeven would be a sound career move. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Berkley in 1995, this was simply not the case. On top of the movie itself being entirely and utterly panned, derided either as controversial for the sake of it, much too campy, or just plain bad, Berkely’s performance was singled out as terrible.
Playing drifter-turned-dancer Nomi Malone, it was Berkley who carried the weight of the entire erotic thriller on her back. Unfortunately, the general consensus is that she failed miserably. Although we’d see her in several smaller supporting roles afterwards, nothing would ever come close again to leading a feature film by a hotshot director.
9. Linda Blair – The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
Recognised by many as the greatest horror movie of all time, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist led to further success for the filmmaker and many of the lead cast and crew, including actors Ellen Burstyn and Max von Sydow. The lead star, Linda Blair, however, who had the arduous task of playing the possessed girl, had no such luck following the completion of the film, forever being pigeonholed as ‘the demonic girl from The Exorcist’.
Whilst earning her a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, The Exorcist also ended up hindering her career, with the intense role forcing her to take a step back from the industry where she never really reached the same level of fame.
8. Sofia Coppola – The Godfather: Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990)
These days, Sofia Coppola is better known for her directorial talents, helming such classic modern films as The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Priscilla, but, at one point in time, she was merely considered to be Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Coppola enjoyed a brief stint as an actor, appearing in her father’s movies, including 1983’s Rumble Fish and 1990s Godfather: Part III.
Yet, the final part of Coppola’s iconic Godfather trilogy did not fare as well as the previous two instalments, with many blaming Sofia for the movie’s poor quality. She later described the experience as “awkward” and ended up dumping a career in front of the camera in favour of one behind it, making her feature film debut in 1999 with The Virgin Suicides.
7. Taylor Kitsch – John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012)
At one point at the end of the 2000s, the American actor Taylor Kitsch was enjoying life right at the top of the Hollywood industry and was even rubbing shoulders with the likes of Oliver Stone and Blake Lively in the very same year that his career would crumble. 2012 saw the release of the Disney live-action sci-fi flick John Carter, a mess of a movie that would shake up the industry on the whole.
So catastrophically bad commercially and critically that it remains known as the biggest box office bomb of all time, Kitsch simply couldn’t save himself from the aftermath, being buried beneath the legacy of the film in the coming years. He’s starred in movies and TV shows since, most notably the second series of the HBO drama True Detective, but he’s never been able to salvage a solid career for himself since.
6. Jake Lloyd – Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999)
When the sci-fi franchise of Star Wars was released to the world in 1977, Hollywood woke up to the first true movie franchise. In the following decade, the Star Wars buzz would hit fever pitch, but then, following the release of Return of the Jedi, came radio silence from creator George Lucas for years. So, when fans heard that Lucas was releasing a prequel series in 1999, starting with The Phantom Menace, the world of cinema erupted.
Centring on the rise of Darth Vader, from his humble beginnings as Anakin Skywalker to being a Sith Lord, Lucas searched for a young actor to play the key character. The actor he chose was Jake Lloyd, a boy who delivered a performance that was widely panned by fans and critics, leading him to ditch the industry altogether following the release of the movie.
5. Demi Moore – G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott, 1997)
In her autobiography, Inside Out, actor Demi Moore called this war drama by Ridley Scott her “proudest professional achievement”. This is an admirable statement and a good sign of someone who sticks by their decisions — because, despite her reverence for it, G.I. Jane was a commercial and critical flop that earned Moore a ‘Worst Actress’ Award at the infamous Oscar-parody, the Razzies. It also played a pivotal role in the Will Smith/Chris Rock Oscar slap that stang Hollywood.
Directly after Scott’s movie, Moore disappeared from the limelight for several years, in part to focus on her family. However, 20 years later, and despite a few credits on hits like Margin Call in 2011 and 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the majority of her roles have been in very obscure low-budget indies.
4. Mike Myers – The Love Guru (Marco Schnabel, 2008)
By the mid-2000s, it seemed like Canadian comic Mike Myers was on the up and up. His hugely successful Austin Powers franchise had seen its third and final film, Goldmember, released in 2002. By 2007, he had turned in another iconic Scottish accent and loveable performance as the titular ogre in Shrek the Third. But then, perhaps blinded by confidence or greed, he made The Love Guru.
This widely derided comedy featuring Myers as an American raised in India more or less stopped him in his tracks. Besides earning several notorious Razzie awards, it marked the last time we would ever see Myers in a lead feature film role to date. While he made a semi-comeback in 2022 with Netflix’s series The Pentaverate, his movie career seems dead in the water.
3. Brandon Routh – Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006)
When Brandon Routh was cast as the next Man of Steel in the Bryan Singer movie Superman Returns, almost everyone was blown away by just how closely the actor resembled Christopher Reeve. Rather than attempt to reinvent the character, like Batman Begins, Routh’s version of Superman was an outright ode to the 1970s iteration — and he did it excellently.
Unfortunately, his emulation of Reeves was too uncanny, and any sense of originality the actor had to offer was lost. The year after, he starred in the indie romcom Fling, which saw a modest theatrical release, but after that, Routh was never to front a major theatrical movie ever again.
2. Jaden Smith – After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan, 2013)
This sci-fi thriller from M. Night Shyamalan marks the second father-and-son duo of Will and Jaden Smith following 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness — and it is significantly inferior. While the sole responsibility for this does not lie with Jaden, who was then only 15, it had a severe impact on his acting career. His father, Will, would even describe the experience of casting his son as “betrayal” in his memoir.
Although he appeared three years later in Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down, it was clear that this generic dystopian tale from Shyamalan had put a nail in Jaden’s thespian coffin. As Will wrote, the movie was “an abysmal box office and critical failure — and what was worse was that Jaden took the hit.”
1. John Travolta – Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)
The career of the American acting icon John Travolta has been a rollercoaster ride, to say the least. Rapidly rising to fame at the end of the 1970s with such films as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and the musical double bill of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, Travolta burned himself out by the following decade, appearing in a number of minor flicks following the release of Blow Out in 1981.
It was none other than Quentin Tarantino who would resurrect his career, however, hiring the star for his 1994 Palme d’Or winner Pulp Fiction, where he thrived beside Samuel L. Jackson. Critics thought he was back with a bang, and for a while, he was, shining in John Woo’s 1997 action flick Face/Off, but his fate was well and truly sealed in 2000 when he reared his face in Battlefield Earth, a woeful sci-fi flick that ridiculed the sheer existence of the star.
