Five actors you love watching on-screen but you’d hate to have a drink with
Everybody has those actors that they think they would be friends with in real life, the ones we form parasocial relationships based on the characters they play and the way they make us feel.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but these people would probably hate you in real life, for actors are a difficult bunch at the best of times.
Living in the spotlight can do strange things to a person, especially when they’re then thrust back into everyday situations, so if you ever did manage to hang out with one of these five stars, you’d end up bitterly disappointed.
These actors are all legends in their own way, and while onscreen, they are undeniable, in real life, they each have their flaws, so if you want further proof that actors are nothing like the characters they play in movies, then look no further.
Five beloved actors you’d hate to have a drink with:
Faye Dunaway
The most annoying thing about this entry is that Faye Dunaway has some really interesting things to talk about.
As a Hollywood star of the late 1960s and 1970s, she was around for some of the most pivotal moments in the US movie system’s history, wherein her 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde is enough to fill an entire evening’s worth of conversation. Hated by those in power, beloved by film historians now, it’s a fascinating topic, but unfortunately, Dunaway wouldn’t want to talk about Bonnie & Clyde, or Chinatown, or any of her other excellent movies and instead want to vent about Mommie Dearest.
Anyone who knows anything about Dunaway and her fall from grace knows it’s all wrapped up in this doomed 1981 biopic. Her performance as an unravelling Joan Crawford brings an entirely new meaning to ‘over-the-top’. For most of her life, she has refused to engage with the movie she believes ended her career; however, her stance has softened in recent years, and she’s been more open to discussing it. Get a few drinks in her, and it’s all you’ll hear about, but nobody likes a whiner at the pub.
Harrison Ford
Who wouldn’t want to grab a pint with Indiana Jones? Whether you grew up with Harrison Ford blasting bad guys on your TV screen or came to his rip-roaring antics later in life, you were likely blown away by just how damn cool the guy is.
Whip in one hand, laser pistol in the other, his adventures are the perfect example of cinema as escapism: a handsome hero overcoming the odds to save the day and get the girl. Even as he’s gotten older, he’s proven that he’s still capable of flinging himself around for our entertainment, but alas, age often comes with one inescapable quality, and that’s grumpiness.
As Ford has advanced in years, he’s made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t like other people. He lives on a giant ranch in the middle nowhere, preferring to spend his time being out in nature or flying planes than interacting with his fellow humans. While he has certainly played up this element of his personality for laughs, it clearly comes from a genuine place. You’d never even manage to get him to come down the boozer, but if you did, he’d be watching the clock the entire time.
Katharine Hepburn
Excusing the fact that you’d have to exhume a corpse in order to make this happen, an evening of drinky-poos with Katharine Hepburn sounds like a nightmare. The problem with this all-time great isn’t so much her, but the era she came up in.
It turned her cold, with the four-time Oscar winner routinely butting heads with her co-workers. Sometimes, she would resort to violence, as Peter O’Toole found out on the set of The Lion in Winter, gaining her a difficult reputation and, in order to survive in this brutally male-dominated world, she leaned into it.
Very early on during the shoot, Hepburn established a sour working relationship with O’Toole, making the actor confess that he almost felt like a shadow of himself, and Hepburn’s intimidation eventually resulted in a physical altercation where she slapped O’Toole, and even justifying it by claiming that “it improved him”. To make matters worse, the actor even revealed later that it wasn’t the only time Hepburn hit him, establishing a clear pattern of problematic behaviour with co-stars.
While she would soften in her later years, in her prime, she didn’t suffer fools gladly. If you think you could win her round over a Guinness and a packet of Scampi Fries, then you’re in for a rude awakening.
Bill Murray
If Bill Murray hasn’t made you laugh at some point in your life, then you might have no soul, for the star of so many classic comedies has a remarkable ability to find the funny in almost every situation.
Whether as a psychotic groundskeeper, a depressed middle-aged actor, or even an animated orange cat, he has brought joy to millions and millions of people for decades. Then there’s his insane personal life: the stories of him turning up in random places unannounced, the fact that he doesn’t have an agent, and his fanatical devotion to baseball, which is all great stuff, making it even sadder that he’s a giant asshole.
Murray’s wild reputation has gone a long way to covering for his horrendous track record. He’s fallen out with enough celebrities to fill an Oscars afterparty, only reconciling with his Ghostbusters pal Harold Ramis just prior to his death, after the two fell out while making Groundhog Day. Then there are the really sinister accusations, making him one of the strongest arguments for separating art from the artist. If he wasn’t one of the funniest people to have ever lived, nobody would give him the time of day.
Marlon Brando
On the line graph of ‘great actors/terrible company’, Marlon Brando is all the way up in the right-hand corner. There’s a reason why all of your favourite actors worship the ground this guy walked on, and that’s his performances and characters have gone down in history and fundamentally changed the way cinema works. The problem with Brando was never what he was capable of, but rather his consistency, where if he was in a good place, you’d get On the Waterfront, but if he wasn’t, then you’d get The Island of Dr Moreau.
Brando’s personal life is the stuff of Hollywood nightmares. A notorious philanderer, he was pretty awful to most of his romantic partners and the other women who refused his advances. He was prone to violent mood swings and outbursts of vile rhetoric, with his comments about Jewish people on Larry King Live in 1996 standing as purely hateful and one of the many black marks against his name.
If anything, this behaviour has only added to his legend, another layer to peel back on a twisted genius. Idolise him if you want to, but if I found out that Marlon Brando was propping up the bar at my local, I’d never drink there again.
