10 respected actors who became laughing stocks
Reputation is a fragile thing. You spend years building it, only for one tiny thing to come along and shatter the glass into a million tiny pieces. This is especially true of actors, who need to tread very carefully if they want to keep getting work and not turn into laughing stocks.
Sometimes, though, the allure of the almighty dollar is just too much, or issues away from the cameras interfere. Cinematic history is rife with examples of once-promising names transforming into figures of fun overnight, and these are just ten of them.
Bad career decisions, bad personal decisions, and a combination of the two are the order of the day here. These actors all had bright futures ahead of them, but threw it all away for one reason or another.
Though some have managed to recover, not everybody gets a second chance. Heed these warnings well.
10 respected actors who became laughing stocks:
10. Ezra Miller
As a young performer, it felt like Ezra Miller was on the verge of having the world at their fingertips. They proved their exceptional range with their performances in We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Perks of Being a Wallflower and joined big franchises like ‘Fantastic Beasts’ and the DCEU.
Unfortunately, Miller’s erratic personal life completely derailed any chance they had of being taken seriously. Allegations ranging from disorderly behaviour to grooming were flung at them, as they slid further and further into a chasm of bizarre, almost parodic activities.
9. Mel Gibson
When People magazine were looking for their first ever ‘Sexiest Man Alive’, they chose Mel Gibson. The star of Mad Max and Lethal Weapon was hot in every sense of the word in the 1980s before establishing himself as a highly capable director with 1995’s Braveheart.
Things changed for the Aussie when he became embroiled in a series of scandals, including his infamous 2006 arrest. He was essentially banished from any good movies and became the butt of many a joke in his absence, and even though he has since returned to the limelight, those days will hang over him like a dark cloud.
8. Ben Affleck
After breaking onto the scene as an actor and writer with Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck became the epitome of a leading man. Big movies, glamorous girlfriends, talk show spots, he had it all, but a series of bad career choices quickly wiped the sheen from this golden boy.
The dreadful Daredevil and Gigli came in quick succession, as did hideous holiday ‘comedy’ Surviving Christmas. Nowadays, Affleck sits somewhere in the middle of the respect scale, having directed a series of acclaimed films like Argo and Air, but he’s never again reached the heights of his younger days.
7. Laura Dern
You’d think that having a major role in Jurassic Park, once the highest-grossing movie of all time, would have set Laura Dern up for life. Unfortunately, she fell foul of TV audiences and their ignorance when she appeared in ‘The Puppy Episode’ of Ellen, AKA the one where Ellen DeGenres came out.
Her role as a lesbian who gives Ellen advice was met with ridicule from the public and the cold shoulder from her peers. Nowadays, Dern is an Oscar-winning actor and a bonafide star, but for a while, she was known only as ‘that lesbian’ from ‘that gay sitcom’.
6. Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdown scuppered what could have been an exceptional career. The young star already had movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Wall Street, and Platoon under his belt, as well as the phenomenally successful TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, before his infamous string of unusual interviews.
It wasn’t just tiger blood and ‘winning’ that soured people on Sheen. His big ‘comeback’ show, Anger Management, was awful, yet somehow ran for 100 episodes. When it emerged that the actor was making huge money for appearing in this trainwreck, things went from bad to worse.
5. Brendan Fraser
This is a sad entry, because a lot of Brendan Fraser’s issues can be blamed on the harassment he suffered in Hollywood, but it’s still remarkable to track how quickly his star fell. From roles in The Mummy, Gods and Monsters, and Crash to dumb family comedies like Furry Vengeance and The Nut Job, he was a shadow of his former self.
He became one of the great ‘what happened to them?’ names until his resurgence in the early 2020s, which included an Oscar win for The Whale. It’s great to see him back where he belongs, but things were touch and go for a very long time.
4. Emilia Clarke
Game of Thrones looked set to make stars out of everyone, but especially Daenerys Targaryen herself, Emilia Clarke. The British actor was one of the major players in the series and attempted to translate that success into movies, but ended up crashing and burning worse than what she did to King’s Landing.
Terminator: Genisys, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Last Christmas are just some of the dreadful films Clarke seemingly made for the money. She would also appear in Marvel’s much maligned Secret Invasion, all of which made her feel overexposed and out of her depth.
3. Colin Farrell
Once again, Colin Farrell’s joke status in Hollywood wasn’t helped by his turbulent personal life, which included the publication of a sex tape in 2006. Around this same time, the Irishman struggled to maintain the momentum he had gathered with films like Tigerland and Minority Report.
He played the villain in the aforementioned Daredevil and appeared in box office flops Alexander and The New World. In Bruges certainly helped things, but it wouldn’t be until a few years later that he was once again able to find the balance between big money-makers and respected passion projects.
2. Faye Dunaway
1967’s Bonnie and Clyde is one of the most important films ever made and Faye Dunaway is a huge part of it. As well as her turn as the doomed outlaw, Dunaway also appeared in The Thomas Crown Affair, Network, and Chinatown, but would be undone by two simple words – Mommie Dearest.
Her utterly bonkers portrayal of Joan Crawford split audiences right down the middle and split more than a few sides in the process. She found it hard to command respect following this bizarre career decision, and although she has been able to bounce back, her tirade against wire hangers will never leave her.
1. Robert De Niro
How do you go from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Godfather Part II to Little Fockers and Dirty Grandpa? Ask Robert De Niro, because that’s exactly what he did. In one of the most high-profile cases of ‘what were were they thinking?’, De Niro’s slump in the early 2000s is the stuff of legend.
Did he genuinely want to do more comedy? Was he bored of being so beloved? Did he really want to buy a boat? Whose to say, but the once-untouchable superstar was now little more than tabloid fodder. He’s back where he belongs now, thank God, but there was a period of time where Robert De Niro was a joke. Imagine that.
