“I might be mad if I looked like that now, too”: Faye Dunaway’s bizarre 2009 feud with Hilary Duff
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, around the time Jackass started, MTV also hosted quite a fun claymation show called Celebrity Deathmatch, in which all kinds of famous folk would be seen battering each other in a wrestling ring in order to solve disputes, albeit only in stop-motion plasticine.
It was, on occasion, very funny and super gory, but sadly, it never featured the feud between Faye Dunaway and Hilary Duff because their intergenerational falling out occurred a couple of years too late to be honoured by the show, although one imagines there could have been some fun to be had getting Dunaway to reprise her gun-toting, deadly Bonnie and Clyde character and Duff to…maybe throw some sharpened vinyl records at her older nemesis.
But how did this tête-à-tête come about in the first place? Surely these two actors are from completely different eras and would have no reason to become bitter enemies? Well, that is true, and the feud, which turned out to be very one-sided, actually occurred due to a mooted remake of the aforementioned Warren Beatty classic.
Around 2009, Duff, who was a former Disney star of titles like Lizzie McGuire and Cheaper by the Dozen, and a big music star too, had begun to be cast in some more adult roles now she was in her early 20s, and she was lined up to co-star in a needless reboot of 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, the nine-time Oscar nominated movie about Beatty and Dunaway’s outlaws in love. Dunaway, who at that point was 68, was asked what she felt about the former ‘House of Mouse’ star stepping into her shoes and reportedly fired back, quite testily, “Couldn’t they at least cast a real actress?”
Well, to say she picked on the wrong person is something of an understatement. For Duff was no stranger to celebrity spats, having already clashed with other gossip mag luminaries such as Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan, and once she was asked about Dunaway’s supposed dismissal, she didn’t hold back.
Asked by E! News what she made of Dunaway’s comments, Duff stated matter-of-factly: “I think that my fans who are going to go see the movie don’t even know who she is. I think it was a little unnecessary, but I might be mad if I looked like that now, too.”
Ouch, and indeed, meow. She wasn’t done there, though, adding that “It’s not OK for people to take stabs at you and to say mean things for no reason”. Dunaway, meanwhile, decided to take the upper hand and maintained a dignified silence (probably a wise idea), and the war of words simmered right down again, but it didn’t do Duff’s prospects of being in the movie any good.
She was quietly let go from the project a couple of years later with a cheque for $100k in her pocket, which isn’t bad for a film you haven’t even been in. While Duff has most recently gone back to making music with a new album called Luck… Or Something, it has been quite some time now since she’s appeared in a movie, her last effort being 2019’s horror The Haunting of Sharon Tate.
Dunaway, it has to be said, has nothing to prove to anyone, though. Now 85, she’s an Academy Award-winning actor, for Sidney Lumet’s 1977 superb satire Network, and has two other nominations to her name as well as 11 Golden Globe nods. She’s widely regarded as one of the greatest screen actors in history.
