NOT content with multi-million paychecks, duplicitous stars love nothing more than to con their audiences by fooling them into watching serious cinema. We name and shame:
Leonardo DiCaprio
Typecast as a clichéd heartthrob so often that playing Gatsby was a legal obligation, Leo decided that to let his fans down not just by dating young but by working with provocative filmmakers to make arty movies nobody enjoys. Usually cast as a Wall Street bastard, slaveowner or red-faced hippy, to make getting offscreen shags more of a challenge.
Scarlett Johansson
Johansson as a hot sex-craving alien is the stuff of fantasy until you’ve seen it. Under The Skin portrayed banging Scarlett as being ghostly men drowning in black liquid, which is not likely how ex-partners remember it. Yes, she still did a Jurassic Park film this summer, but there’s a sneaking suspicion she doesn’t really mean it.
Robert Pattinson
The vampire nonsense was a decent start for the young lad, but contemptibly he has not only cheekbones but ambition. Ambition that’s seen him appear in arty films by Werner Herzog, Claire Denis and Robert Eggers where his characters masturbate and have grizzled beards, confirming prejudices of how shite arthouse cinema is to his fans who just want Batmobile car chases.
Emma Stone
Going from Superbad’s love interest to a baby’s brain in a woman’s body working in a brothel is quite the flex, if you consider tottering around with a quizzical expression as the pinnacle of art. For poor men who fancied Emma Stone in Spider-Man it’s a classic bait-and-switch: yes, there will be boob exposure. But you have to get through a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.
Adam Sandler
Paul Thomas Anderson, already guilty of giving Mark Wahlberg a career and making Daniel Day-Lewis retire, is to blame for casting a one-note comedian in his arty movie. Ever since, viewers wanting silly jokes and slapstick violence have had to tread carefully in case this is one of the serious ones. Unfair and grounds for a class-action lawsuit.
Daniel Radcliffe
You’re 22, you will always be remembered as a child wizard, and now you’ve got to have a career? So Dan treated his fandom to all sorts of acting experiments, from growing demon horns to playing a farting corpse on an island. None of those worked, leading him to the path of no return of Samuel Beckett on stage. And there was still a poor Harry Potter fan in the front row.
