Celebrity Rivalries: 10 Actors Who Hated Working With Each Other
A high-budget movie set ought to be the happiest place on earth, in principle. You're getting paid absurd sums of money to pretend to be a time-traveling adolescent or whatever, there's free food, and you're doing what you love.
But sometimes the actors clash with one another due to professional or personal issues. They could even outright hate each other and refuse to stay in a room together. We also have that one coworker we just detest. And when it comes to detesting their co-stars, Hollywood actors aren't all that different from the rest of us.
This list of co-stars who were feuding sheds information on the actors' approach, which mostly entails yelling at the crew and only using their character's name while addressing them (looking at you here, Snipes). Some have vowed never to collaborate with one another, taking their antagonism to new heights. Read on to know which actors are on the list, some of the rivalries may even consist of your favorite celebrities.
As Love herself recently told Marc Maron: “This is my role. We’d done all these tables reads; I’d gone to work privately with David [Fincher].” So, with Love set to star, while Pitt was out for lunch with Gus Van Sant, the duo decided to get in touch with her and pitch a future movie about Kurt Cobain with Pitt taking on the role of the grunge pioneer. “It was like the Hellmouth opened,” Love recalled. “Oh my God, ‘We wanna do it about Kurt!’ And 22 years later, I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, ‘Sure,’ and f—k ‘em later. I went nuclear.”
Instead, she rallied against the suggestion in an outburst. “‘I don’t do Faust; who the f—k do you think you are?!’” she shouted. Later, she got another call: “My landline rang, and it was David Fincher. I knew it was gonna be him. By the way, God bless Helena Bonham Carter. She’s a genius. I’ve never seen that film … And yeah, he fired me because I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKRI2wEw7I
Initially, the group got along great, as Ryder recalls: “We hung out before the movie in rehearsals and stuff.” Little did they know, Coppola productions are prone to turning tricky, as he exclaimed after the horrors of the jungle when filming Apocalypse Now, “little by little, we went insane.” Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that Ryder would say, “But it wasn’t the same after we started shooting. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s his way of working, but I felt like there was a danger.”
Ryder was exhausted by this mysterious strain. She has spoken in-depth about how the shoot left her "tired, tense, and not very happy" in interviews. There has been much speculation about whether there was a deeper reason behind all of this, but Coppola himself was unable to identify it. The renowned director afterward added: “They got along, and then one day they didn’t. Absolutely didn’t get along. None of us were privy to what happened.” This was far from ideal, given the romantic and erotic nature of some of their scenes together throughout the grueling shoot. Coppola’s workaround was far from wildly inspired either, as he comically explained: “I had to say to her, ‘OK, play this scene and make-believe it’s me instead of Gary. Make-believe it’s whoever.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onbiOVpX0_w
When Hardy arrived on set three hours late one day, leaving Theron waiting very uncomfortable in a scorching "War Rig" in full costume and make-up for most of the morning, the two had already started to irritate each other. Cameraman Mark Goellnicht described the bloody aftermath in the book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: "Tom turns up, and he walks nonchalantly across the desert. She exits the War Rig and begins cursing obnoxiously at him, demanding "Fine the f****** c*** a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he's held up this crew."
She rallied at Hardy, “How disrespectful you are!” And Goellnicht said that Hardy didn’t have any of it. “He charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?’ He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.” Thereafter, Theron claimed that the tension felt “out of hand,” and she requested protection on set. She concluded that it “was horrible”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8
Adding: “Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he’s an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes.”
Those working behind the scenes saw a way that this wasn't going to be healthy holiday fun. Since Witherspoon didn't even want to pretend to be intimate with Vaughan, a sex scene had to be removed because the tensions were so high. Afterward, Vaughan double-booked himself throughout the press campaign on purpose so that Witherspoon would have to promote the movie by herself. He didn't even make it to the premiere, in fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6veo6Js7HUE
Hoffman then stepped over the line in a literal sense, as Streep told The New York Times, “This was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me.” This famously made its way into the final cut of the movie documenting spousal abuse. As Streep adds: “And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”
Hoffman was going through a difficult divorce at the time, which caused the boundary between reality and fiction to get blurred when he arrived at work to play a guy going through a difficult divorce. He told the Huffington Post, "I'm sure I was acting out on her [Streep] throughout the movie. "Things I was feeling toward the wife I was actually divorcing." "I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation," he subsequently said in an apology for any inappropriate behavior during this time. I apologize. It doesn't accurately represent who I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80UzhoD-RBs
They didn't like them, Roberts herself said plainly. “From the moment I met him, we sort of gave each other a hard time, and naturally, we get on each other’s nerves,” she began. “[While he can be] completely charming and very nice, he’s also completely disgusting. He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems to go out of his way to repel people. He’s a kick.”
This led to a really amusing comedy as the actors' PR teams sought to cover the rifts and support the movie's promotion while the actors themselves continued insisting that they didn't actually get along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJC2ZhG7BcY
But, that love was first accompanied by uncomfortable tension. According to Nick Cassavetes, director of The Notebook: “They were really not getting along one day on set. Really not. Ryan came to me, and there were 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, ‘Nick come here’. He’s doing a scene with Rachel and he says, ‘Would you take her out of here and bring in another actress to read off-camera with me?’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘I can’t. I can’t do it with her. I’m just not getting anything from this.”
The feeling was mutual. So, a gloves-off meeting was arranged. “We went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out,” Cassavetes said. When his leading stars emerged, they said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ and like the plot of the film itself, the rest is ancient history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3tjDuLjtts
He continued: “It’s nothing to do with the other person. All that fades away, and you’re just left with appreciation and love for the people you’ve worked with for so long. We used to argue about nothing. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
When she informed The Guardian that this was true on both sides, Anderson was pleased to confirm it. She said, "I mean, absolutely, there were certainly times when we despised each other. The term "hatred" is overused. We didn't have lengthy conversations. We both occasionally caused each other pain since it was so intense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKziOmsJxzE
“All of a sudden, he put his hands on me,” she troublingly recalled. “I turned in all tranquillity and blew in his face, like a cat stroked the wrong way and said, ‘Don’t you ever dare to do that again. Never again!’” She continued: “As I pulverized him with my eyes, he seemed small, defenseless, almost a victim of his own notoriety. He never did it again, but it was very difficult working with him after that.”
Brando would later refrain from commenting on this incident and instead angled his own gripe against director Charlie Chaplin, labeling him a “fearsomely cruel man,” and an “egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher.” Concluding: “He harassed people when they were late, and scolded them unmercifully to work faster.” And that he “was probably the most sadistic man I’d ever met”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHW3fqwqGtY
“Their chemistry was supposed to fly off the charts, but in private, they’re not getting along,” a source reported at the time. “She was disappointed that he didn’t get in better shape for the role and that he didn’t want to cut his hair. Johnny retreats to his own trailer until he’s called out again. He thinks she’s really full of herself.”
However, Depp contrasted these rumors later when he told Vanity Fair: “She’s everything. She’s kind of a walking poem, Angelina is. She’s this perfect beauty but at the same time very deep, very smart, very quick, very clever, very funny, and also has a very perverse sense of humor.” So, maybe the anonymous source simply caught them on a bad day?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9a1r1-g79k
But sometimes the actors clash with one another due to professional or personal issues. They could even outright hate each other and refuse to stay in a room together. We also have that one coworker we just detest. And when it comes to detesting their co-stars, Hollywood actors aren't all that different from the rest of us.
This list of co-stars who were feuding sheds information on the actors' approach, which mostly entails yelling at the crew and only using their character's name while addressing them (looking at you here, Snipes). Some have vowed never to collaborate with one another, taking their antagonism to new heights. Read on to know which actors are on the list, some of the rivalries may even consist of your favorite celebrities.
#1 Brad Pitt vs Courtney Love
The fact that Courtney Love was originally slated to play the Fight Club part before Helena Bonham Carter won it was rarely recognized until recently. Brad Pitt's existence of a "shit list" for Hollywood was likewise kept a secret. He just wants to spread happiness and light in the world, as his friend and fellow Bullet Train actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson explained: "He just wants to be among people who are there to have a good time. You work with a lot of actors, and after some time, you start writing down things like, "I will never work with this person again." The "good" list and the "shit list" are both on Brad's list. It appears that Courtney Love is firmly on the latter.As Love herself recently told Marc Maron: “This is my role. We’d done all these tables reads; I’d gone to work privately with David [Fincher].” So, with Love set to star, while Pitt was out for lunch with Gus Van Sant, the duo decided to get in touch with her and pitch a future movie about Kurt Cobain with Pitt taking on the role of the grunge pioneer. “It was like the Hellmouth opened,” Love recalled. “Oh my God, ‘We wanna do it about Kurt!’ And 22 years later, I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, ‘Sure,’ and f—k ‘em later. I went nuclear.”
Instead, she rallied against the suggestion in an outburst. “‘I don’t do Faust; who the f—k do you think you are?!’” she shouted. Later, she got another call: “My landline rang, and it was David Fincher. I knew it was gonna be him. By the way, God bless Helena Bonham Carter. She’s a genius. I’ve never seen that film … And yeah, he fired me because I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCKRI2wEw7I
#2 Winona Ryder vs Gary Oldman
With Francis Ford Coppola at the helm and Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder as two of the best performers of their time, this suspenseful Dracula adaption was destined to be a classic of horror. What they were about to experience, it turned out, was more like a representation of the underworld than an ordinary living hell.Initially, the group got along great, as Ryder recalls: “We hung out before the movie in rehearsals and stuff.” Little did they know, Coppola productions are prone to turning tricky, as he exclaimed after the horrors of the jungle when filming Apocalypse Now, “little by little, we went insane.” Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that Ryder would say, “But it wasn’t the same after we started shooting. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s his way of working, but I felt like there was a danger.”
Ryder was exhausted by this mysterious strain. She has spoken in-depth about how the shoot left her "tired, tense, and not very happy" in interviews. There has been much speculation about whether there was a deeper reason behind all of this, but Coppola himself was unable to identify it. The renowned director afterward added: “They got along, and then one day they didn’t. Absolutely didn’t get along. None of us were privy to what happened.” This was far from ideal, given the romantic and erotic nature of some of their scenes together throughout the grueling shoot. Coppola’s workaround was far from wildly inspired either, as he comically explained: “I had to say to her, ‘OK, play this scene and make-believe it’s me instead of Gary. Make-believe it’s whoever.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onbiOVpX0_w
#3 Charlize Theron vs Tom Hardy
On-screen romance can be deceiving. In the great Mad Max: Fury Road, Tom Hardy may have portrayed a man of few words, but there was unquestionably a titillating frisson between his retiring maverick and Charlize Theron's forceful joint lead. Unfortunately, a major argument between the two occurred during production and nearly caused the much-anticipated movie to fail.When Hardy arrived on set three hours late one day, leaving Theron waiting very uncomfortable in a scorching "War Rig" in full costume and make-up for most of the morning, the two had already started to irritate each other. Cameraman Mark Goellnicht described the bloody aftermath in the book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: "Tom turns up, and he walks nonchalantly across the desert. She exits the War Rig and begins cursing obnoxiously at him, demanding "Fine the f****** c*** a hundred thousand dollars for every minute that he's held up this crew."
She rallied at Hardy, “How disrespectful you are!” And Goellnicht said that Hardy didn’t have any of it. “He charged up to her and went, ‘What did you say to me?’ He was quite aggressive. She really felt threatened, and that was the turning point.” Thereafter, Theron claimed that the tension felt “out of hand,” and she requested protection on set. She concluded that it “was horrible”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJnMQG9ev8
#4 Reese Witherspoon vs Vince Vaughan
It's difficult to believe that anybody, even among the actors and crew, took the seasonal cash-in of Four Christmases seriously enough for a bust-up to occur, but Hollywood is full of surprises. The leaders just didn't agree on much of anything in this particular case. Reese will come early looking camera-ready, according to a Daily News source, while Vince [Vaughan] glides into set in the morning looking like he just got home from a night out.Adding: “Then Reese tries to force Vince into blocking out each scene and running through their lines as Vince tries to convince her that he’s an ad-libber and wants to play around and see where the scene goes.”
Those working behind the scenes saw a way that this wasn't going to be healthy holiday fun. Since Witherspoon didn't even want to pretend to be intimate with Vaughan, a sex scene had to be removed because the tensions were so high. Afterward, Vaughan double-booked himself throughout the press campaign on purpose so that Witherspoon would have to promote the movie by herself. He didn't even make it to the premiere, in fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6veo6Js7HUE
#5 Dustin Hoffman vs Meryl Streep
The triumph of the 1980s film Kramer vs. Kramer did not come easy, despite the fact that it went on to win a record-breaking five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and actor and actress in a major role for Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, respectively. The issues initially surfaced when Streep convinced writer-director Robert Benton to allow a last-minute change to the screenplay in order to give it a more progressive stance. Hoffman, who had apparently previously prepared for the moment in its original setting, was apparently incensed by this adjustment and exclaimed, "Meryl, why don't you stop carrying the flag for feminism and just act the scene."Hoffman then stepped over the line in a literal sense, as Streep told The New York Times, “This was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me.” This famously made its way into the final cut of the movie documenting spousal abuse. As Streep adds: “And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”
Hoffman was going through a difficult divorce at the time, which caused the boundary between reality and fiction to get blurred when he arrived at work to play a guy going through a difficult divorce. He told the Huffington Post, "I'm sure I was acting out on her [Streep] throughout the movie. "Things I was feeling toward the wife I was actually divorcing." "I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation," he subsequently said in an apology for any inappropriate behavior during this time. I apologize. It doesn't accurately represent who I am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80UzhoD-RBs
#6 Julia Roberts vs Nick Nolte
I Love Trouble, a 1994 romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte, challenged them to complete the traditional romantic comedy arc of moving from hatred to love in under 90 minutes. Regrettably, the dup did not have enough time to do the same trick off-screen.They didn't like them, Roberts herself said plainly. “From the moment I met him, we sort of gave each other a hard time, and naturally, we get on each other’s nerves,” she began. “[While he can be] completely charming and very nice, he’s also completely disgusting. He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems to go out of his way to repel people. He’s a kick.”
This led to a really amusing comedy as the actors' PR teams sought to cover the rifts and support the movie's promotion while the actors themselves continued insisting that they didn't actually get along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJC2ZhG7BcY
#7 Ryan Gosling vs Rachel McAdams
Given that Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams would go on to not only pull off some of the most genuine on-screen chemistry in romantic movie history but also to enter a personal relationship that ended amicably just due to the strains of Hollywood, with Gosling maintaining that he was lucky to have one of the "greatest girlfriends of all time," this entry is perhaps the most surprising inclusion on the list.But, that love was first accompanied by uncomfortable tension. According to Nick Cassavetes, director of The Notebook: “They were really not getting along one day on set. Really not. Ryan came to me, and there were 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, ‘Nick come here’. He’s doing a scene with Rachel and he says, ‘Would you take her out of here and bring in another actress to read off-camera with me?’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘I can’t. I can’t do it with her. I’m just not getting anything from this.”
The feeling was mutual. So, a gloves-off meeting was arranged. “We went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out,” Cassavetes said. When his leading stars emerged, they said, ‘All right, let’s do this,’ and like the plot of the film itself, the rest is ancient history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3tjDuLjtts
#8 Gillian Anderson vs David Duchovny
When it comes to a 217-episode television series, you have major problems if you are not enjoying yourself. It's terrible enough to dislike your co-star while suffering through the laborious process of creating a movie for a few months or so. As David Duchovny says, the relationship between The X-Files couple got off to a rocky start. The former sex addict cracked, "Familiarity begets disdain.He continued: “It’s nothing to do with the other person. All that fades away, and you’re just left with appreciation and love for the people you’ve worked with for so long. We used to argue about nothing. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
When she informed The Guardian that this was true on both sides, Anderson was pleased to confirm it. She said, "I mean, absolutely, there were certainly times when we despised each other. The term "hatred" is overused. We didn't have lengthy conversations. We both occasionally caused each other pain since it was so intense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKziOmsJxzE
#9 Sophia Loren vs Marlon Brando
Why does the amiable world of the rom-com turn out to be the most turbulent in development? Is it because it's too demanding for celebrities to act as though they enjoy one another? In her 1963 autobiography Yesterday, Now, Tomorrow: My Life, Sophie Loren describes her dreadful experience working with Marlon Brando on the set of A Countess from Hong Kong.“All of a sudden, he put his hands on me,” she troublingly recalled. “I turned in all tranquillity and blew in his face, like a cat stroked the wrong way and said, ‘Don’t you ever dare to do that again. Never again!’” She continued: “As I pulverized him with my eyes, he seemed small, defenseless, almost a victim of his own notoriety. He never did it again, but it was very difficult working with him after that.”
Brando would later refrain from commenting on this incident and instead angled his own gripe against director Charlie Chaplin, labeling him a “fearsomely cruel man,” and an “egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher.” Concluding: “He harassed people when they were late, and scolded them unmercifully to work faster.” And that he “was probably the most sadistic man I’d ever met”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHW3fqwqGtY
#10 Angelina Jolie vs Johnny Depp
Your private life frequently turns painfully public when you're a movie star, and that goes for the world behind the scenes as well. Ricky Gervais' humorous parody of The Tourist at the Golden Globes is essentially the only remembered aspect of the farce unless you were a part of the tense production.“Their chemistry was supposed to fly off the charts, but in private, they’re not getting along,” a source reported at the time. “She was disappointed that he didn’t get in better shape for the role and that he didn’t want to cut his hair. Johnny retreats to his own trailer until he’s called out again. He thinks she’s really full of herself.”
However, Depp contrasted these rumors later when he told Vanity Fair: “She’s everything. She’s kind of a walking poem, Angelina is. She’s this perfect beauty but at the same time very deep, very smart, very quick, very clever, very funny, and also has a very perverse sense of humor.” So, maybe the anonymous source simply caught them on a bad day?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9a1r1-g79k
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