Ah, movie magic! The sounds and the sights! The glitz and glamour! The several hours in a makeup chair applying prosthetics that ultimately make you look like an idiot! Despite the fact that we’ve been doing movies for so long that you’d think they’d be able to nip the shitty ones in the bud, horrible movies are still regularly released. Being in a bomb is bad enough, but knowing that you had to don an eminently stupid costume every day to do it? Even worse. Double that if you’re an actor of actual renown, who now forever has a stain of them in some stupid suit among their Google image results of award acceptance speeches.
Here are six dignified actors who had to wear some all-time sartorial stinkers…
Gary Oldman as Dracula
Gary Oldman is an absolute legend. If you need any reminder, just pick any of his many movies or the recent, criminally underrated Slow Horses. The man is also in possession of a respectably stocked awards shelf, including an Oscar for 2018’s Darkest Hour, and a handful of BAFTAs, for whatever those are worth. He’s got a gravitas that can carry some pretty ridiculous looking getups, like in The Fifth Element. Every acting bone in his body, however, wasn’t able to save his costume in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was a nightmare for all the wrong reasons. Apparently, the whole reason he took the role was because of how much he liked the line “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you.” For that, he was repaid across the entire spectrum of costume indignity, from uncomfortable bat suits to whatever this receding hairline meets gothic Hey Arnold! monstrosity of a look is.
Robin Williams as Popeye
As you might have been able to guess, there’s going to be a pretty heavy comic-book presence on this list. This entry, though, is a little less Marvel and a little more Sunday funnies. It might be tough, but Captain America’s arms can be built in the gym. The appendages of famous sailor-man Popeye cannot. So Robin Williams was left to strap on the prosthetic forearms of the famous seafarer. The movie, arguably, is much better than the collective memory of it. Still, even for someone who played Mrs. Doubtfire, it’s got to be hard to start every day of work making yourself look like a character that was drawn that way specifically because someone thought it looked funny.
Tim Curry in Legend
He might not have the Academy Awards the previous two actors have, but it would feel patently insane to argue that Tim Curry isn’t a great actor. It’s impossible to deny the gift he brought to each and every role he ever played. And yes, I mean every role. He’s somebody that can make most costumes feel perfectly reasonable just by how deep he dives into whatever ridiculous character he’s been cast as. Sometimes, though, the suit is simply too much.
That’s one way to describe what he wore to play the Lord of Darkness in the movie Legend. Now, your mileage may vary depending on your opinions on heavy metal album covers, but it’s a pretty ridiculous costume out of context. All I’m saying is, when an actor has to go through eight hours a day of makeup, wear three-foot-long fiberglass horns that give him back pain and then soak it all off in the tub for an hour afterward to avoid the adhesive literally tearing his skin off? That costume better be fucking undeniably cool. At least make the chin look less like a pair of balls that spent too long in a sauna.
Pretty Much Everybody in Batman & Robin
Mark off your bingo card, because here come the bat-nipples in a story about bad costuming. Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin boasted a genuinely star-studded cast, and gave them all some of the most wince-worthy footage of their careers. The sidekicks Robin and Batgirl got off easy, maybe accidentally benefiting from a little less attention than the main heroes and villains. Their costumes, in retrospect, are regular stupid and clear remnants of the 1990s aesthetic. Suits like George Clooney’s, with perhaps the most famous vestigial nipples in all of cinema? Or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze getup, that looks like something from a commercial Eric Wareheim directed for an air-conditioning company? Those are lasting misses.
You could argue that Catwoman looking like she’s a fetish pinup from the Nightmare Before Christmas universe isn’t exactly off-brand, but having to get baby-powdered into a latex suit every day can’t feel particularly powerful.
Actually, Pretty Much All Batmen
Really, when it comes down to it, costuming up as the Caped Crusader is rarely a pleasant experience. The Dark Knight’s suit, like the T-shirts bearing his logo, seem to be something that people constantly think looks much cooler than it actually does. It’s the leather duster of superhero costumes. Christian Bale probably got off the best, but it’s rare to find another ex-Batman that doesn’t have a couple gripes about the suit. Val Kilmer probably felt a little less like a lithe, stealthy superhero and master of martial arts when he couldn’t stand up or sit down without assistance. Another way to make someone feel embarrassed while playing a very powerful character? Make them wear a much less battle-ready motion-capture suit like Ben Affleck did in Batman v. Superman, which he called “the most humiliating, ridiculous thing in the world.” Maybe they all would have been better off wearing hockey pads after all.
Sean Connery in Zardoz
20th Century Studios
If you came here looking for it, here it is. Some pictures are worth a thousand words. Others, just a confused, disgusted silence.