“I wasn’t very happy”: The movie Taron Egerton hated every second of making
Taron Egerton is one of those actors who you never hear about for years on end, only for them to crop up and be absolutely huge.
He began his career in 2012 and soared to prominence three years later with Kingsmen: The Secret Service, and over the next decade or so, his career has ebbed and flowed, landing himself in plenty of big hits and even winning a Golden Globe in 2020 for his role in Rocketman, but never quite managing to land the part to catapult him to global superstardom.
An opportunity to achieve this dream presented itself in 2018, when Egerton took on one of the most famous characters in all of fiction, starring as the titular folk hero in a big-screen adaptation of Robin Hood. Alongside other cast members like Jamie Foxx, Ben Mendelsohn, and Eve Hewson, the film also had the backing of Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its producers. There were big hopes that this would continue Egerton’s rise as a leading man; unfortunately, none of those hopes materialised.
The $100million movie failed to break even at the box office, grossing just $86.5m, making one of the biggest flops of the year. To make matters worse, the reviews were shocking, with critics bemoaning its attempt to modernise the tale and to make it more of an action story than was ever going to be possible, which led it to be well represented at the Golden Raspberry awards, nominated for ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel’.
Egerton, who was very close to being cast as Han Solo around this time, had his own issues with the movie, and they all tied into the behind-the-scenes environment, about which, speaking with Variety, the Welsh actor said he felt let down by the production process, as he had been promised something very different from the finished product.
“It was absolutely not the movie that I signed up to make,” he said, “It was pitched to me in a different way. I think it was made by committee and I think it lost its vision. I wasn’t very happy on set. I didn’t have a very happy time making it.”
Robin Hood was directed by Otto Bathurst, an English filmmaker who had previously won a Bafta for working on Peaky Blinders. If that show is anything to go by, then audience members should have expected a slick, grubby take on life as an outlaw in Sherwood Forest, but as you can probably guess, this didn’t happen.
The movie is all over the place tonally, violently jolting between modern smoothness and attempted punk-rock dinginess, failing to bring the character up to speed with modern politics. Given how relevant a hero who redistributes wealth could have been in 2018, it falls remarkably flat.
The story of Robin Hood has been picked up time and time again, with even a new version coming out in 2026 with Hugh Jackman as an older version of the character. To make a dent in this incredibly crowded lineage, you have to do something special, and while Egerton might have been promised this, it certainly didn’t materialise.
