The actor who suffered the biggest career downward spiral, according to science
Fame can be a fickle mistress; one day you’re the cream of the crop, and the next you’re having to buy super noodles from Lidl and getting excited about Harry Redknapp eating spiders on the telly, and it’s the same in the cut-throat world of Hollywood
While some actors stay in the limelight for decades, others have their stars burn out even before the cement dries on the Walk of Fame. The idea of a career trajectory for actors is one that we’re all pretty familiar with. Usually, there will be a peak period of popularity where an actor does their best work, when they get a run of great scripts, and they make most of their money. There’s Will Ferrell in the mid-2000s, for instance, or Gene Hackman in the 1970s, or Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s.
Some, like Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio, have been able to stretch that trajectory out over a number of decades, not really fading away at all, in fact increasing their pulling power the longer their career goes on. Tom Cruise is another, massive in the ‘80s and ‘90s and massive now, all of those still making highly-rated movies.
But other actors like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino kind of dip in and out when it comes to quality; both have made historically good films early in their careers, then some absolutely horrendous ones later on, although they are both still capable of excellent work. And it’s the latter actor that the data boffin Stephen Follows has used as an example in order to produce a sliding scale for performers who started out making great movies, but have gone downhill over time.
He picked Pacino because once he’d plugged in the data of the critics’ ratings of his movies over a 50-year period, he noticed they gradually declined from an average of almost 80 out of 100 down to 40 out of 100. He then went a step further and looked at the data for some 250 leading actors in movies and tracked them over time to see who had the steepest drop off in quality, and once the computer spat out the result, there was one clear winner.
That actor is none other than Eric Bana, the former Incredible Hulk who rose to fame in his native Australia thanks to the brilliant Chopper in 2000, before moving to Hollywood and starring in a run of huge movies like Black Hawk Down, Troy, Steven Spielberg’s Munich and JJ Abrams’ Star Trek in 2009.
Critics’ ratings for Bana’s movies dropped dramatically in the years after that, seeing him plummet from an average score of around 73 down to 40, probably not helped by his taking roles in genuine stinkers like Guy Ritchie’s unfollowable King Arthur: Legend of the Sword in 2017.
Runner-up to Bana was the aforementioned Robert De Niro, which is his own fault for starring in nonsense like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and third was Jim Sturgess, who you never really seem to see or hear of these days.
But what about actors who go in the other direction, the ones who started off making poorly received films and got better as the years went on? Well, top of that list is Angelina Jolie, who started off in the mid-1990s with movies like Hackers, earning her an average score from critics of around 40 out of 100, and went on to make much better ones, like Clint Eastwood’s 2008 drama Changeling, for which she won an Oscar, setting her total score after three decades of acting to around 62.
