E ven the best of us sometimes make mistakes – they just don’t end up being watched by millions of people worldwide. For actors, however, life is a never-ending series of criticisms. A bad movie performance can live on in infamy just as long as a great one, and no actor is immune.
Whether it’s veteran legends like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, or stars at the peak of their powers such as Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Hardy , even the very best actors have proved themselves capable of truly terrible turns. Sometimes these performances are met with nothing but disdain, mockery, and Razzie nominations – other times, they manage to slip mercifully under the radar. To be clear, the actors aren’t always the ones at fault; many of the performances on this list came in generally dreadful films, with performers let down by shoddy scripts or filmmaking.
Here’s The Independent ’s list of 17 of the absolute worst performances from some of the best actors around...
Tom Hanks – Cloud Atlas (2012) Hanks actually plays six different roles in the Wachowski sisters’ ambitious era-spanning epic, and he’s by no means bad in all of them. But his performance as gangster-turned-novelist Dermot “Duster” Hoggins could well be the worst of Hanks’s entire career. Laughably broad, and with an accent that’s ostensibly Irish but comes across as bad cockney, “Duster” is a creation best left in the dustbin.
Nicolas Cage – The Wicker Man (2006) There have been few, if any, actors .
