The Worst Performances By 20 Great Actors

There’s a terrific quote attributed to the famous director, Alejandro González Iñárritu. It goes like this:

“To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.”

The more you watch movies, the more that sentiment makes sense. Sometimes a group of remarkably talented people get together and the result is a masterpiece. A few years later, that exact same group of people can reunite, feeling equally inspired and motivated, collaborate equally well, and make another movie —that one could be a creative and commercial disaster. (If you saw Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux, which share a director, writer, producers, and stars, you should understand what I’m talking about.)

Similarly, a wonderful actor is capable under certain circumstances of delivering a mediocre or even horrible performance. And those are the kinds of performances we’re looking at today; the worst performances by 20 of our all-time favorite actors and actresses.

While it might sound like a brutal insult to be included on such a list, it could also be taken — and should be taken, I think — as a genuine compliment. After all, to earn your way on a list of the very bad performances by great actors, you first need to be a great actor — one so great that it feels inconceivable that they could deliver a performance as cruddy as the ones below.