11 Actors Who Hate Characters They’ve Played

1.

Penn Badgley has expressed many, many times how much he dislikes Joe Golberg from You. On the Today Show, he said about Joe: “He’s a pretty reprehensible guy. You start to discover his true motives pretty early on — eight minutes into the show. And he’s a guy who’s capable of stalking, he’s a guy who’s capable of murder, he’s a guy who’s capable of a lot of manipulation and abuse.”

He also told Vanity Fair how he disliked Joe even more in the second season of the series. Badgley said, “He’s always saying, ‘If only I could show you who I really am. Up until that point, he’s never been able to do that…Then he gets it, and he’s a total dick about it. That was when I was like, ‘Joe, I’ve never liked you less! I’ve never liked you less.’”

Badgley feels that Joe is “amongst the worst” and that redemption is not possible for the character. The show creator, Sera Gamble, also shared that Penn checks in with her to make sure that Joe won’t get a happy ending.

2.

Allison Williams conveyed her dislike of Marnie Michaels from Girls, saying, “Marnie would drive me crazy if we were friends in real life.”

Williams stated that she didn’t like a lot of Marnie’s relationship choices: “Like, sleeping with Elijah is crazy, sleeping with Ray is crazy, furiously hitting on Desi when he mentions his girlfriend in their first conversation is crazy.”

One choice Marnie made that Williams hated the most was her decision to sleep with artist Booth Jonathan in the second season. Williams expressed, “I was fighting that the whole time as Allison. I did not want her to go down that road. I thought Marnie was better than that, but she wasn’t, so I had to be okay with it, too.”

3.

Robert Pattinson made it clear over the years how much he despises Edward Cullen and the Twilight Saga. Pattison told OK! magazine, “You always get weirdos like Edward who seem to attract women for some reason. If Edward wasn’t a fictional character and you met him in reality, he is like one of those guys who would probably be an axe murderer or something.”

He’s called out the age gap between Edward and Bella, saying, “What am I (Edward Cullen) doing with this kid? I’m 108 years old.”

When asked if he took anything from the set of the last movie, Pattinson responded with, “My dignity.”

4.

Katherine Heigl felt that Alison Scott in Knocked Up was written in a way that negatively portrayed women.

She said, “It was a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight. I had a hard time with it on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women?”

5.

Evangeline Lilly said about Kate on Lost that “At the beginning, she was kind of cool. And then, as the show went on, I felt like she became more and more predictable and obnoxious.”

“I felt like my character went from being autonomous — really having her own story and her own journey and her own agendas — to chasing men around the island.” She said, “That irritated the shit out of me.”

Once Kate’s storyline started to focus more on her love triangle with Jack and Sawyer, Lilly became annoyed. “I did throw scripts across rooms when I’d read them,” she said, “because I would get very frustrated by the diminishing amount of autonomy she had and the diminishing amount of her own story there was to play.”

In the final seasons, Lilly stated, “I wanted her to be better, because she was an icon for strength and autonomy for women, and I thought we could have done better than that.”

6.

Jamie Dornan referred to his role as Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey saying, “I don’t think I’ll ever play a ­character who’s less like me.”

“[He’s] not the sort of bloke I’d get along with,” Dornan shared. “All my mates are easygoing and quick to laugh — I wouldn’t imagine myself sat in a pub with him. I don’t think he would be my type, when it comes to choosing mates.”

7.

Blake Lively told Allure that starring on Gossip Girl felt personally compromising and that “you want to be putting a better message out there.”

Lively said, “I would not be proud to be the person who gave someone the cocaine that made them overdose and then shot someone and slept with someone else’s boyfriend.”

8.

Viola Davis revealed to Vanity Fair how she regrets her role as Aibileen Clark in The Help. “There’s no one who’s not entertained by The Help,” she said. “But there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth].” She also said the film was “created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.”

“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” Davis said. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”

9.

Sally Field told Howard Stern that she didn’t enjoy playing Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man films. Field said, “It’s not my kind of movie.” Sally took the role as a favor to her friend Laura Ziskin who had cancer and was producing the first Amazing Spider-Man film, which would also be her last.

Field agreed with Stern’s statement that Aunt May’s purpose in the film was just to prop up Spider-Man every now and then. She admitted that she didn’t do much to prepare for the role because “it’s really hard to find a three-dimensional character in it, and you work it as much as you can, but you can’t put 10 pounds of sh*t in a 5-pound bag.”

10.

Jennette McCurdy has expressed how embarrassed she was to play Sam Puckett on iCarly. In her podcast, Empty Inside, McCurdy said, “My experience with acting is I’m so ashamed of the parts that I’ve done in the past…but I resent my career in a lot of ways. I feel so unfulfilled by the roles that I played and felt like it was the most just cheesy, embarrassing [experience]…”

McCurdy added, “I did the shows that I was on from, like, 13 to 21, and by 15, I was already embarrassed. My friends at 15, they’re not like, ‘Oh, cool, you’re on this Nickelodeon show.’ It was embarrassing.”

11.

And lastly, Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke in an interview with Playboy about how flawed his character Tom Hansen from (500) Days of Summer is. Gordon-Levitt stated, “The (500) Days of Summer attitude of ‘He wants you so bad’ seems attractive to some women and men, especially younger ones. But I would encourage anyone who has a crush on my character to watch it again and examine how selfish he is.”

Gordon-Levitt shared, “He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.”