Listen, we all have off days at work. Whether you’re an Oscar-winning actor or a mediocre-at-best barista, some turnouts are just going to be better than others. Maybe you’ve been hungover for a month or just stopped giving a shit about making good movies/coffee. Maybe it’s impossible to work with the material you’re given. Like, honestly, an iced green tea lemonade with mocha sauce and pumpkin spice topping? Not even the god of baristas could make that taste good.
Well, Redditor Crafty_Letter_1719 doesn’t necessarily agree. “A great actor can still give a great, committed performance even if the film is ultimately terrible,” they argued. “For example, Raul Julia in Street Fighter or Frank Langella in He-Man.” When a usually great actor turns in a bad performance, it’s usually “a case of an otherwise talented actor clearly only being in it for a paycheck or simply being miscast,” they went on. After all, they pointed out, “Even somebody as revered as Daniel Day Lewis has Eversmile, New Jersey resting against his near exemplary back catalog of work.”
They then asked r/Movies, “What is the worst performance by a great actor?” and their fellow Redditors brought all kinds of bad to the table.
Jack Lemmon in ‘Hamlet’
Tom Hanks in ‘Elvis’
Joaquin Phoenix in ‘Napoleon’
Edward Norton in ‘The Italian Job’
Brendan Fraser in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Tommy Lee Jones in ‘Men in Black 3’
Chow Yun Fat in ‘Dragonball Evolution’
Harrison Ford in ‘Ender’s Game’
Christoph Waltz in ‘Spectre’
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in ‘Righteous Kill’
Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in ‘The Happening’
Javier Bardem in ‘The Little Mermaid’
Keanu Reeves in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
Helen Mirren in ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’
Matt Damon in ‘The Great Wall’
Jodie Foster in ‘Elysium’
John Mills in ‘Ryan’s Daughter’
Marion Cotillard in ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
Viola Davis in ‘The First Lady’
Eddie Redmayne in ‘Jupiter Ascending’
Gary Oldman in ‘Tiptoes’
