IT’S always a blow to discover a favourite character is played by an actor who’s a bit of a dipshit in real life. Like these illusion-shattering prima donnas.
George Peppard
You’d assume actors would treat The A-Team as a good laugh. Not foul-tempered egomaniac pisshead George Peppard, who was relentlessly horrible to the female actors the producers kept trying to bring in. If you’re going to be a dick, at least do it in a more weighty role than child-friendly mercenaries with a kill rate of zero*.
Zooey Deschanel
Zooey doesn’t like the term ‘manic pixie dream girl’. Possibly because fellow actors have described her as ‘nasty’ and ‘moody’ in real life, which must be a crushing blow for her fans. Next time just idolise someone transparently horrible, like Anne Robinson.
Richard Burton
Apart from Marc Antony, Burton’s best-known role is arguably Major John Smith in Where Eagles Dare, in which [SPOILER ALERT FOR A 1968 FILM] he leads his team out of the clutches of the Germans with a brilliantly executed plan. However Burton had a habit of disappearing from the set for insane drinking binges with Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris – not ideal friend choices for an alcoholic – so in reality he’d have got captured immediately in a drunken haze and the epic WW2 adventure would be 12 minutes long.
Brie Larson
Captain Marvel has a strong theme of Carol Danvers taking the knocks but never giving up. Brie Larson has a strong theme of whinging about trivial perceived injustices. You get the feeling that if her boiled egg is too runny, the over-representation of white men in film criticism had something to do with it.
Russell Crowe
He’s great in Napoleonic Wars movie Master and Commander as the highly-disciplined, harsh-but-moral naval captain. On dry land Russ’s hobbies include getting pissed, challenging people to fights once pissed, and putting on weight at a rate of knots. One act of diva behaviour was threatening a TV producer because he wasn’t allowed to read out his poem at an awards ceremony. A shame, because surely everyone would have loved to hear that.
Roseanne Barr
Ms Barr made her name in the decent enough sitcom Roseanne. Unfortunately she went from ‘wisecracking regular mom’ to ‘batshit alt-right racist’ when she decided to tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a black former advisor to Barack Obama, saying that ‘[if the] muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby’ it would be Ms Jarrett. Which is mindbogglingly racist, like something it would have taken even Goebbels a few days to come up with.
Tom Cruise
Actors’ weird beliefs reduce their bankability so Hollywood tries to keep them quiet. Only partially successfully with Tom Cruise, who, unlike Maverick or Jack Reacher, believes Xenu, ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, implanted alien souls (Thetans) in humans and they must be kept in tippy-top condition by ‘auditing’ your ‘engrams’. It’s no wonder he does so many sci-fi movies.
Lucille Ball
Lucy was fun, fun, fun, apart from being horrible. As well as being incredibly rude to minions, she’d make sure fellow actors had their screen time and funny lines reduced. It shows an impressive commitment to megalomania, in what was surely dubbed I Increasingly Hate Lucy.
Harrison Ford
Ford had the bloody cheek to not be that into Carrie Fisher when they were having an affair, which male Star Wars nerds will tell you is Just Not On. Decades later he looks visibly bored in the sequels, which is just not very Han Solo. Star Wars would be a very different film if, at the end, he’d gone: ‘Should I help Luke with this blowing up the Death Star thing? Nah.’
Christian Bale
In fairness, his famous outburst could have been a bad day. But would Batman go ballistic over someone distracting him in the Bat Cave? Er, actually ‘yes’, since every recent incarnation has chosen to portray him as a socially isolated, emotionally unstable neurotic. The last thing you want is superheroes to be fun, right?
*Yes, five characters died in total but none were killed by Hannibal et al. It makes The A-Team a safer place to live than the Shetland Islands.
