“We were so miserable”: the movie Madonna hated every second of making
It would be an understatement to say that Madonna’s film career wasn’t as successful as her musical endeavours.
The route for musicians to become actors is fairly common, and there are many examples of A-listers who successfully made the transition, with Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Queen Latifah just a handful of musical artists who proved to be equally talented actors. However, there are some musicians who were simply so popular that it became impossible to ever take them seriously doing anything else.
In fairness to Madonna, she had pretty seismic expectations to meet, given that she was responsible for some of the biggest and most acclaimed albums of the 20th century. She even showed a lot of promise in some of her early film roles and gave standout performances in Desperately Seeking Susan and A League of Their Own, but that unfortunately didn’t save her from being part of Shanghai Surprise, an adventure comedy that co-starred her husband at the time, Sean Penn.
Although it wouldn’t be the last terrible film that she would be a part of, it did become a particularly humiliating experience because of the negative press. Pitched as a classic caper comedy in the vein of ‘30s screwball titles, Shanghai Surprise starred Penn as a sleazy conman and Madonna as a missionary nurse who helps supply him with stolen opium. The couple refused to promote the film when it neared its release date in the summer of 1986, which Madonna said was because of their frustration with director Jim Goddard.
“The director turned out to not know what he was doing,” she claimed, “We were on a ship without a captain and we were so miserable while we were working on it that I’m sure it shows”.
Madonna’s marriage to Penn would only last a few more years, and she accused him of disrupting the filmmaking process.
“I had just gotten married,” Madonna said, “It was still really new to me, and my ex-husband was really kind of railroading his way into the whole project. Because I was in such awe of him, I kind of let him make a lot of the decisions that I shouldn’t have allowed him to make. I was so green. I just found myself in a situation where I felt completely bullied and out of control, and I didn’t know what was going on, and it was not pleasant.”
That critics found there to be no chemistry between Penn and Madonna was a little ironic, and perhaps a sign of their impending divorce. At the same time, they were also two performers who couldn’t have had more different sensibilities: Madonna had mostly been appearing in high-concept comedies, whereas Penn was being taken seriously as a method actor who would take on darker and more challenging roles. The script itself for Shanghai Surprise didn’t do them any favours, especially when compared to other recent romantic adventure comedies like Romancing the Stone and The Princess Bride.
The film wasn’t bad enough to destroy either of their careers, though, as Madonna would still rank as one of the biggest-selling artists of all-time, and Penn would later tie a record with his three Academy Award wins. The only person who really suffered from Shanghai Surprise was the director, as Goddard retreated to television and only made one more feature 12 years later.
