Stick to the day job: the 10 worst movies ever directed by actors
Actors have been directing for just as long as directors have been acting, with one hand of filmmaking continuing to feed the other – and vice versa – since the earliest days of the industry. It’s led to plenty of careers that have been equally iconic on either side of the camera, but being an experienced performer doesn’t mean calling the shots instantly becomes second nature.
Clint Eastwood has set the bar, something actors and directors have been openly admitting for decades, but the percentage of those who have achieved even a fraction of the success enjoyed by a legend who conquered the industry on both fronts is minuscule at best.
For every Ben Affleck, Ron Howard, George Clooney, Mel Gibson, or Greta Gerwig who’s thrived in each position, there’s a James Franco, Madonna, Kevin Bacon, or William Shatner lurking just around the corner to underline that it’s nowhere near as easy as the best have made it look.
Whether it’s ego, vanity, hubris, or nobody being bold enough to tell them they’re not very good at it, plenty of actors have made dreadful movies. Few have ever turned out worse than the following ten, and the most frightening thing is that in several cases, they still went on to direct again.
10 awful movies directed by actors:
Nothing but Trouble (Dan Aykroyd, 1991)
After starring in a string of hit comedies that numbered The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and Ghostbusters throughout the 1980s, Dan Aykroyd decided to take the next step in his career by making his feature-length directorial debut on the horror comedy Nothing but Trouble.
Assembling a star-studded cast to pay tribute to the schlocky creature features he loved growing up, Akyroyd’s brother Peter penned the screenplay, with the actor playing a dual role opposite Chevy Chase, John Candy, and Demi Moore. It was obviously a passion project and a labour of love, but it also happened to be an awful movie.
Every bit as tonally confused as it was inconsistent, Aykroyd did a horrendous job of balancing between scares and laughs, resulting in a garbled mess of styles, sketches, gags, and frights that tanked at the box office and earned him a Razzie for ‘Worst Supporting Actor’. While there are some who’ve come to embrace Nothing but Trouble as an unheralded cult gem, make no mistake: those people are wrong.
Sonny (Nicolas Cage, 2002)
The Coppola dynasty has thrown up some stellar directors over the years, from five-time Oscar-winning patriarch Francis to Sofia, Roman, and Gia. However, it didn’t take long to become clear that Nicolas Cage would never be one of them.
The star makes a suitably bizarre cameo as a manic and moustachioed character named ‘Acid Yellow’, which is the only memorable thing about Sonny. For whatever reason, John Woo was a huge fan of his Face/Off favourite’s one and only tilt behind the camera, and he was about the only one.
There’s little style, even less substance, and disjointed performances galore, making the tale of James Franco’s sex worker and former soldier trying to find his place in life a curio among Cage’s filmography, which says a lot looking at what he’s been getting up to for the last four decades.
Ghost Dad (Sidney Poitier, 1990)
Ignoring the fact that it’s headlined by Bill Cosby, Ghost Dad would be an affront to the good name of cinema even if it didn’t star the disgraced actor and comedian in the lead role, and what makes it even worse is that it was the last feature directed by the trailblazing and legendary Sidney Poitier.
The Oscar-winning icon helmed nine features, with titles like Uptown Saturday Night and Stir Crazy displaying that he was a gifted filmmaker, but all of that talent appeared to desert him when he lent his name to the schmaltzy, saccharine, and altogether shitty fantasy comedy.
A critical pariah and a commercial catastrophe, Ghost Dad deserved every bit of its failure. People didn’t even want to watch it before Cosby’s fall from grace, and there can’t be anyone who’d even consider giving it a chance today.
Gotti (Kevin Connolly, 2018)
Although he may not be as famous as some of the others featured, Kevin Connolly made his name as an actor before turning to directing. He was a series regular on Entourage and had additional roles in The Notebook, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky V, and Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher, among others.
His third feature was an unmitigated disaster, which isn’t even limited to the biographical crime drama’s six Razzie nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’ for John Travolta. Before audiences had even discovered how wretched Gotti was, it had already caused a scandal.
Suspiciously positive user-generated reviews led to accusations that the studio had artificially inflated the reception to Gotti, knowing it had a stinker on its hands, an underhanded tactic that admittedly made more sense when everyone found out how truly abysmal it really was.
The Layover (William H Macy, 2017)
Character actor extraordinaire and regular scene-stealer William H Macy may have been hoping nobody would notice his intentions, but there’s one very obvious thing about The Layover that’s hard to overlook.
Even ignoring the fact that the star of so many acclaimed independent dramas decided a formulaic and utterly atrocious sex comedy was the perfect place to make his second movie as a director, it can’t help but be noticed the bearded and long-haired male protagonist bears more than a passing resemblance to Macy himself, albeit a lot younger and more chiselled.
With that in mind, positioning Matt Barr’s Ryan as the object of affection for both Alexandra Daddario and Kate Upton reeks of queasy fantasy, something that would have been a lot easier to forgive were The Layover not one of the worst comedies of the decade, reducing itself to the eye-rolling staple of having two attractive women fighting over a man.
Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey, 2004)
Presumably, Kevin Spacey was laughed out of so many boardroom meetings when he pitched the idea of playing Bobby Darin that he decided the only way to massage his ego to a suitable extent was to go ahead and do it himself.
The subject of the musical biopic was 37 when he died, while Spacey was 45 when it was released, looked every single one of those years, if not more, and bore very little resemblance to Darin. As well as playing the lead and directing, the Oscar winner and current industry exile also co-wrote the screenplay and produced, making it one of Hollywood’s more blatant vanity projects.
He did notch a Golden Globe nomination, but that doesn’t mean much based on the ceremony’s questionable history of rewarding undeserving performances. Paramount literally quit Beyond the Sea because the studio was adamant Spacey was far too old for the part, but because he was the one who owned the rights, his nauseating self-indulgence was allowed to bear its tedious fruit.
The Jesus Rolls (John Turturro, 2019)
The Jesus Rolls doesn’t just fail as a thinly veiled remake of the controversial French cult classic Going Places and a wholly unnecessary spinoff from The Big Lebowski: it fails just fine on its own as a work of cinema.
The Coen brothers had always been adamant that they were never going to revisit their beloved comic caper, but they agreed to let John Turturro tell a new story with his character. Production began in mid-2016, but the finished film wouldn’t premiere until late 2019, which is never a good sign.
Some characters work better in small doses, and Jesus Quintana is definitely one of them. Why did it need to be a Lebowski offshoot when Turturro could have told the same story untethered to one of his most memorable roles? Possibly with the belief that it would generate more buzz and bring more eyeballs, which it didn’t because the movie was crap.
The Last Face (Sean Penn, 2016)
On paper, there was no reason to believe that The Last Face was destined to fail as embarrassingly as it did, with Sean Penn having one of the better track records among actors-turned-directors.
The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, and Into the Wild were all widely acclaimed and markedly different from each other in terms of tone and style, with Oscar winners Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron leading the line in a relevant and timely drama, prestige beckoned.
Or so everybody thought until it was booed mercilessly during its premiere at Cannes. The Last Face wanted to be an important movie, but it was greeted as a laughing stock, so much so that Bardem compared it to a funeral.
On Deadly Ground (Steven Seagal, 1994)
In a turn of events that shocked nobody apart from probably the man himself, noted terrible actor Steven Seagal turned out to be an equally terrible director when he decided the best way to let the world know how much he cared for the environment was to make an incredibly cack-handed movie about it.
Michael Caine knew it was bad, which turned into a positive in the long run when On Deadly Ground gave his rapidly stagnating career a much-needed boot up the arse, whereas all Seagal had to show for his feature-length debut was a Razzie for ‘Worst Director’.
In typical fashion, the leading man intimated that not only did he think society as a whole simply wasn’t ready for a film carrying a message as important as the one he was trying to convey, but he even hinted that he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for it.
The Postman (Kevin Costner, 1997)
Few directors in history, regardless of whether they made their name as actors or not, have ever endured a drop-off between their first and second features anywhere near as dramatic or dismal as Kevin Costner.
His debut, Dances with Wolves, became the highest-grossing western of all time, recouped its budget almost 20 times over at the box office, and won seven of the 12 Oscars it was nominated for, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Costner’s sophomore effort, meanwhile, failed to shift even half of its production costs into ticket sales. It swept the board at the Razzies by winning all five of the trophies it was nominated for, effectively setting its star and director’s entire career back by the better part of two decades.
On the plus side, after sinking millions of his own dollars into The Postman only to watch it go up in flames right in front of his very eyes, Costner surely wouldn’t be daft enough to risk even more money on an ambitious passion project he produced, directed, and starred in, right?
