Recently, Reddit user BIGxBOSSxx1 asked the folks of r/movies, “Has there ever been any actor or actress who was brutally honest about the movie they’re making during a press tour?”They further elaborated, “I’m seeing people post videos of the Stranger Things cast kind of having weird reactions to the story/writing, and it reminded me of the time where this exact thing happened with Game of Thrones, where the final season was not well received, and it looked apparent that the cast also didn’t like it. It got me wondering, has there ever been a notable instance where an actor or actress was like, ‘Yeah, no, this shit straight up sucks,’ on a press tour? I understand this means they’d probably get blacklisted and probably wouldn’t find any acting jobs after, but I’m wondering if maybe someone with enough notoriety could get away with it.”Here are the top-voted responses:1. “Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web press tour was incredible.”
blacktreetv / Capital Buzz / The Graham Norton Show
“I found her honesty refreshing at the time, but then I saw the movie, and her acting was so bad, I think she’s quite hypocritical; she has her share of responsibility.”
2. “When Robin Williams went on Letterman to promote Club Paradise, he joked about it being the in-flight movie on his trip there.”
3. “Robert Pattinson pretty famously did not give a shit about Twilight by the time the last movie came out during the press tour.”
4. “Oscar Isaac was definitely tired of Disney’s bullshit by the time The Rise of Skywalker came about.”
5. “Matthew Goode was pretty open during the Leap Year press tour that it wasn’t worth watching.”
Jonathan Hession/©Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
6. “I kept noticing how chipper Harrison Ford seemed during the press tour for The Force Awakens. He’s usually kind of a sourpuss, especially when talking about Han Solo, a character he despises. It all clicked when I watched the movie and realized he was relishing the fact that he’ll never have to go on a press tour for Han Solo ever again.”
7. “I saw the interview with Liam Neeson (I think on GQ YouTube) where he talks about his top roles. Because it came out at the same time as The Naked Gun, they obviously included it. The question was something like, ‘What drew you to the role of Frank Drebin?’ Neeson rubbed his fingers together and mouthed, ‘money.’ That was refreshing.”
8. “Cary Grant was so famous for talking shit about ANY movie he was in that it’s rumored studios started to put money aside for after production to send him on remote vacations so the press couldn’t find him until it was out of the news.”
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9. “Chris Pine’s facial expressions, during the Don’t Worry Darling press tour. He looks like he wants the floor to swallow him up or be anywhere else.”
“It may not count as brutally honest, but the press tour for Don’t Worry Darling was more entertaining than the film and Florence Pugh couldn’t be arsed to deal with it.”
10. “Linda Hamilton, for Terminator: Dark Fate. Just non-stop vitriol for all the beauty standard hoops she has to jump through for the part — hormone injections, countless supplements, meal replacement shakes, starving, working out multiple times per day, pounds of makeup on her face. She fucking hated it. Not just the process, but the fact that a 63-year-old still had to look middle-aged and ‘fuckable’, or it was a no. She crushed it, though. Good for her.”
11. “Not a direct example, but related. In an interview this year Stellan Skarsgård talked about doing the press tours for movies, and in regards to bad ones, he said that the publicity teams reach out to him about doing press and that he says something along the lines of, ‘I’ll do it but I’m going to give my honest opinion about the film,’ and that they usually don’t book him any interviews for those ones.”
12. “Shia LaBeouf trashed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, calling it a ‘terrible’ movie.”
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13. “Christopher Plummer loathed The Sound of Music, which makes me sad because I adore that movie and he was great in it.”
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14. “This wasn’t during the press tour, but Michael Caine famously said he’d never seen Jaws 4, but he’s seen the house it paid for.”
15. “Jim Carrey trashed Kick-Ass 2 on the promo tour. Apparently, the movie was much more violent than he thought it would be. He actively campaigned against it while ‘promoting’ the movie.”
16. “Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz for their movie Dream House. For some reason, the entire twist ending is revealed in the commercial for the movie, so they stopped promoting and started trashing it.”
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17. “There’s that famous clip of Norm Macdonald on Late Night with Conan, roasting Courtney Thorne-Smith’s movie (she was the other guest). I believe the movie was supposed to be Carrot Top’s breakout moment, Chairman of the Board. Courtney tried to get him to stop, but it’s clear she didn’t think very highly of the film either. 10/10 very funny moment.”
18. “Woody Harrelson did a very revealing AMA regarding Rampart, as I recall.”
19. “It wasn’t during the press tour, but Tim Roth called United Passions ‘a crap movie,’ he did for the money, specifically to fund his children’s college tuition. Which fits because FIFA (whose origin is depicted in the movie) is also only about money.”
20. “I remember way back when John Oliver was hosting The Daily Show, he had Hank Azaria as a guest. John mentioned how this was the first time they had met, even though they were both in The Smurfs 2 movie, and they both kind of made fun of it.”
Neilson Barnard / Getty Images for Comedy Central, Lloyd Bishop / NBCU / Getty Images
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21. “Ron Perlman talking about working on In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. ‘I’m doing weapons training for this piece of shit, then I go to Romania to shoot another piece of shit, then come back to shoot my part in this piece of shit…[sighs]…What can I say? My wife loves shoes.'”
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22. “Edward Norton with The Italian Job. He talked a lot about how he was forced to do it, and if he didn’t, he was going to be sued for breach of contract on his multi-picture deal with the studio.”
©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
23. “Paul Giamatti played a supporting role in Ben Affleck’s action vehicle Paycheck. He went on The Daily Show, and Jon opened with, ‘So… what motivated you to do this movie… Paycheck?’ Giamatti burst out laughing and said, ‘Yeah, this wasn’t a labor of love or anything.'”
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24. “The only reason I watched Mother! was because how much Jennifer Lawrence said she fucking hated making it LOL.”
25. “Tom Hardy saying his favorite parts of Venom were all the scenes they cut, probably to get a PG-13 rating.”
26. Finally, “You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted, and I tear myself apart on the screen.” —Orson Welles on The Transformers: The Movie.
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Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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