From Brad Pitt to Charlize Theron: 10 actors who hated working with each other
Hollywood is the mecca of egos and lies. The movie capital is so full of twaddle that we even willingly accept it when certain stars claim to have never even seen the movies they star in—which, I’m sure we can all agree, is clearly about as flagrant a lie as Pablo Picasso claiming to have never seen one of his own paintings (he didn’t make this claim, but you get the point).
In this world of squabbles, whoppers and hobnobbing, feuds are a commonplace folly. The place is so competitive and all-consuming that bad blood runs rampant. When you add into this mix the sheer vastness of the star power and egos at play, then you have a heady cocktail capable of bringing down an elephant.
Take your own workplace, for example; if you struggle to get along with Johnny from accounts, then just imagine what it would be like if you suddenly had to pull a 13-hour shift on location pretending to be in love with the bastard. Sparks would surely fly… like a grinder taken to live electric cable, and people would get hurt.
Thus, below we have waded through all the backstage backstabbing, scathing side-mouthed rumours, and cutting cutting-floor remarks that have besieged Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes supposed sanctuary of art. From firings to feisty flings, these are ten tasty Hollywood feuds to satiate your penchant for drama.
10 actors who hated working with each other:
Dustin Hoffman vs Meryl Streep
Although Kramer vs Kramer went on to win a whopping five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and actor and actress in a leading role for Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, respectively, the success of the 1980s flick did not come easily. The problems first came to the fore when Streep got a late amendment made to the script approved by writer-director Robert Benton in order to give it a more progressive angle. Apparently, this alteration angered Hoffman, who had already prepared for the scene in its original context, and he yelled: “Meryl, why don’t you stop carrying the flag for feminism and just act the scene.”
Hoffman then stepped over the line in a literal sense, as Streep told The New York Times, “This was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me.” This famously made its way into the final cut of the movie documenting spousal abuse. As Streep adds: “And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”
At the time, Hoffman was getting a divorce in real life, which blurred the line of fiction when he came to work to act as a man in the midst of a troubling split. “I’m sure I was acting out on her [Streep] throughout the movie,” he told the Huffington Post. “Stuff that I was feeling toward the wife that I was divorcing in real life.” He later apologised for any misconduct during this period and stated: “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
Winona Ryder vs Gary Oldman
As two of the finest actors of their generation and with Francis Ford Coppola at the helm, Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder were set to deliver a horror masterpiece with their thrilling adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As it turned out, what was in store for them was more of a living hell than a mere depiction of the underworld.
Things went swimmingly among the crew at first, as Ryder recalls: “We hung out before the movie in rehearsals and stuff.” Little did they know, Coppola productions are prone to turning tricky, as he exclaimed after the horrors of the jungle when filming Apocalypse Now, “little by little, we went insane.” Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that Ryder would say, “But it wasn’t the same after we started shooting. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s his way of working, but I felt like there was a danger.”
This inexplicable tension made Ryder very weary. She has mentioned extensively in interviews that the shoot left her “tired, tense, and not very happy”. Speculation has been rife about whether there was a deeper cause to all this, but Coppola himself certainly couldn’t put his finger on it. The legendary filmmaker later commented: “They got along, and then one day they didn’t. Absolutely didn’t get along. None of us were privy to what happened.” This was far from ideal, given the romantic and erotic nature of some of their scenes together throughout the gruelling shoot. Coppola’s workaround was far from wildly inspired either, as he comically explained: “I had to say to her, ‘OK, play this scene and make-believe it’s me instead of Gary. Make-believe it’s whoever.’”
Charlize Theron vs Tom Hardy
On-screen chemistry can prove deceptive. Tom Hardy may have played a man of few words in the magnificent Mad Max: Fury Road, but there was undoubtedly a titillating frisson between his retiring maverick and Charlize Theron’s powerful joint lead. However, at one point while filming, the long-awaited movie was almost derailed when the two had a huge row.
The pair had already been grating on each other when Hardy rocked up to set three hours late one day, leaving Theron waiting rather uncomfortably in a sweltering ‘War Rig’ in full make-up and costume for most of the morning. In the book Blood, Sweat & Chrome, camera operator Mark Goellnicht recalled the violent fall-out: “Tom turns up, and he walks casually across the desert. She jumps out of the War Rig, and she starts swearing her head off at him, saying, ‘Fine the f****** c*** a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he’s held up this crew’.”
She rallied at Hardy, “How disrespectful you are!” And Goellnicht said that Hardy didn’t have any of it. “He charged up to her up and went, ‘What did you say to me?’ He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.” Thereafter, Theron claimed that the tension felt “out of hand,” and she requested protection on set. She concluded that it “was horrible”.
Reese Witherspoon vs Vince Vaughan
It’s hard to imagine that anyone took the seasonal cash-in of Four Christmases seriously enough, even among the cast and crew, for a bust-up to unfurl, but Hollywood is full of surprises. On this occasion, the leads simply didn’t see eye-to-eye to an extreme degree. “Vince [Vaughan] rolls onto set in the morning looking like he just came in from a night out, while Reese will arrive early looking camera-ready,” claimed one Daily News source.
Adding: “Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he’s an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes.”
It quickly became clear to those behind the scenes that this wasn’t going to be wholesome festive fun off-camera. In fact, tensions ran so high that a sex scene was cut because Witherspoon didn’t even want to pretend to be intimate with Vaughan. Latterly, Vaughan also intentionally double-booked himself during the press push so that Witherspoon had to promote the film alone. In fact, he never even made it to the premiere.
Brad Pitt vs Courtney Love
It was a little-known fact, until recently, that Courtney Love was set to star in the Fight Club role that eventually went to Helena Bonham Carter. It was also under wraps that Brad Pitt has a Hollywood “shit list”. As his pal and Bullet Train co-star, Aaron Taylor-Johnson revealed: “He just wants to bring light and joy into the world and be around people who are there to have a good time. You work with many actors, and after a while, you start making notes: ‘I am definitely not working with this person ever again.’ Brad has this list too: the ‘good’ list and the shit list.” Courtney Love, it would seem, is firmly on the latter.
As Love herself recently told Marc Maron: “This is my role. We’d done all these table reads; I’d gone to work privately with David [Fincher].” So, with Love set to star, while Pitt was out for lunch with Gus Van Sant, the duo decided to get in touch with her and pitch a future movie about Kurt Cobain with Pitt taking on the role of the grunge pioneer. “It was like the hellmouth opened,” Love recalled. “Oh my God, ‘We wanna do it about Kurt!’ And 22 years later, I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, ‘Sure,’ and f—k ‘em later. I went nuclear.”
Instead, she rallied against the suggestion in an outburst. “‘I don’t do Faust; who the f—k do you think you are?!’” she shouted. Later, she got another call: “My landline rang, and it was David Fincher. I knew it was gonna be him. By the way, God bless Helena Bonham Carter. She’s a genius. I’ve never seen that film … And yeah, he fired me because I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt.”
Julia Roberts vs Nick Nolte
When Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte starred opposite each other in 1994’s I Love Trouble, they were tasked with pulling off the classic romantic comedy arc of going from hate to love in 90 minutes. Sadly, there wasn’t enough time in the world for the dup to achieve the same feat off-screen.
Their dislike was put bluntly by Roberts herself. “From the moment I met him, we sort of gave each other a hard time, and naturally, we get on each other’s nerves,” she began. “[While he can be] completely charming and very nice, he’s also completely disgusting. He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems to go out of his way to repel people. He’s a kick.”
This resulted in a rather comic farce whereby the actor’s PR teams tried to pave over the cracks and help promote the film, while the stars themselves kept saying, ‘Nope, we do, in fact, dislike each other.’
Ryan Gosling vs Rachel McAdams
This entry is perhaps the most startling inclusion on the list, given the fact that Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams would not only pull off some of the most genuine on-screen chemistry in romantic movie history but also go on to enter a personal relationship which ended amicably simply due to the strains of Hollywood with Gosling maintaining that he was lucky to have one of the “greatest girlfriends of all time”.
Nevertheless, that love first resulted in awkward tension. As The Notebook director, Nick Cassavetes would recall: “They were really not getting along one day on set. Really not. Ryan came to me, and there’s 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, ‘Nick come here’. He’s doing a scene with Rachel and he says, ‘Would you take her out of here and bring in another actress to read off-camera with me?’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘I can’t. I can’t do it with her. I’m just not getting anything from this’.”
The feeling was mutual. So, a gloves-off meeting was arranged. “We went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out,” Cassavetes said. When his leading stars emerged, they said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ and like the plot of the film itself, the rest is ancient history.
Gillian Anderson vs David Duchovny
It’s bad enough hating your co-star while enduring the arduous process of making a movie for a few months or so, but when it comes to a 217-episode series, you’ve got real problems if you’re not enjoying yourself. As David Duchovny confirms, things started badly with The X-Files pair and went downhill from there. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” the former sex addict quipped.
He continued: “It’s nothing to do with the other person. All that fades away, and you’re just left with the appreciation and love for the people you’ve worked with for so long. We used to argue about nothing. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
And Anderson was happy to ratify this went both ways when she told The Guardian: “I mean, yes, there were definitely periods when we hated each other. Hate is too strong a word. We didn’t talk for long periods of time. It was intense, and we were both pains in the arse for the other at various times.”
Sophia Loren vs Marlon Brando
Why is it that the affable realm of the rom-com proves to be the most tumultuous in the making? Is it because the stars have to pretend to like each other, and that proves too draining? In Sophie Loren’s 1963 memoir, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, she details her horrific experience filming A Countess from Hong Kong with Marlon Brando.
“All of a sudden, he put his hands on me,” she troublingly recalled. “I turned in all tranquillity and blew in his face, like a cat stroked the wrong way and said, ‘Don’t you ever dare to do that again. Never again!’” She continued: “As I pulverised him with my eyes, he seemed small, defenceless, almost a victim of his own notoriety. He never did it again, but it was very difficult working with him after that.”
Brando would later refrain from commenting on this incident and instead angled his own gripe against director Charlie Chaplin, labelling him a “fearsomely cruel man,” and an “egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher.” Concluding: “He harassed people when they were late, and scolded them unmercifully to work faster.” And that he “was probably the most sadistic man I’d ever met”
Angelina Jolie vs Johnny Depp
When you’re a film star, your private life often becomes tragically public and that even applies in the world behind the scenes. The Tourist was comically lampooned by Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes but, ultimately, that’s the most memorable thing about the whole farce—that is, unless you were involved in the fiery filming.
“Their chemistry was supposed to fly off the charts, but in private, they’re not getting along,” a source reported at the time. “She was disappointed that he didn’t get in better shape for the role and that he didn’t want to cut his hair. Johnny retreats to his own trailer until he’s called out again. He thinks she’s really full of herself.”
However, Depp contrasted these rumours later when he told Vanity Fair: “She’s everything. She’s kind of a walking poem, Angelina is. She’s this perfect beauty but at the same time very deep, very smart, very quick, very clever, very funny, and also has a very perverse sense of humour.” So, maybe the anonymous source simply caught them on a bad day?
