The “terrible” movie Daniel Brühl hated every second of making: “A shitshow from day one”
From his portrayal of Baron Zemo in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to his Golden Globe-nominated turn in The Alienist, Daniel Brühl isn’t the most famous actor on the planet, but he might be one of the most interesting. A multi-lingual polymath with a knack for playing intense, real-feeling villains, he is criminally underused by Hollywood.
However, as is the case with all actors, he hasn’t always had the best luck on set. His 2013 film Rush almost got director Ron Howard beaten up, although that was mostly Chris Hemsworth’s fault. Two of the stunt drivers on the film were killed in accidents just a few months apart, although, again, I’m not saying Brühl had anything to do with this.
In an interview with Page Six in 2024, Brühl spoke about one movie that he had an absolutely horrible time working on. Unfortunately, for the nosey among us, he was professional enough not to name it.
“There was another film that I would rather not mention that was a total shitshow from day one,” he said. “How am I going to survive this? This is terrible… When you feel that something is not right, there’s no way to fix it. It’s such a painful process when you can feel something is wrong, and you cannot just go, you cannot leave, and then you look at your miserable face in the mirror every evening.”
Now, Brühl clearly doesn’t want people to know the identity of this film, out of respect to the cast and crew who did actually work hard to make it as best as possible. We should honour his wishes, however, where’s the fun in that? A little bit of snooping delivers a potential suspect.
In 2018, Brühl starred in the sci-fi horror flick The Cloverfield Paradox – set in a space station, the film follows a group of astronauts who, in an attempt to solve Earth’s energy crisis with the use of a particle accelerator, accidentally cause a harrowing event… It was the third (and thus far final) entry in the Cloverfield franchise and explores some of the origins of the first film’s iconic monster.
Brühl explained that his mystery “shitshow” movie was filmed in Los Angeles. The Cloverfield Paradox was shot almost entirely in LA, possibly so it could receive tax breaks from the city’s government. The shooting process was highly secretive, with writer Oren Uziel claiming that he only found out the movie was going to be part of the Cloverfield series after filming had already begun.
This could have been some of the chaos that Brühl was referring to, although it’s important to point out that nobody else involved in the production has spoken out against it. Whether The Cloverfield Paradox was the film that Brühl hated working on or it was something else entirely, this whole episode reveals just how hard it is to get a Hollywood movie made.
Even the most mediocre offering – which The Cloverfield Paradox was, by the way – takes a superhuman amount of work to get off the ground. Honestly, it’s a miracle any movie ever gets finished.
