Yahoo Lifestyle 14 Times Actors Held Nothing Back And Name-Dropped The Worst Directors They've Ever Worked With
This post contains mention of sexual assault.
On set, a director is essentially an actor's boss. However, unlike most other jobs, actors often have to tap into their emotions in a big way. They should be able to trust their director to help guide them, but unfortunately, directors don't always treat their actors with the care they should.
Here are 14 times actors called out their worst experiences with directors:
1.In 2024, George Clooney told British GQ, "The older you get, time allotment is very different. Five months out of your life is a lot. And so it's not just like, 'Oh, I'm going to go do a really good film, like Three Kings, and I'm going to have a miserable fuck like David O. Russell making my life hell. Making every person in the crew's life hell.'"
"It's not worth it. Not at this point in my life. Just to have a good product," he said.
In 2000, George reportedly told Playboy that the director screamed and yelled "all day, from day one," humiliated a camera operator, made a script supervisor cry, and got violent with an extra.
He alleged that David shoved the extra, who was "a little nervous" about a stunt, and kicked him and threw his walkie-talkie at an assistant director who tried to intervene.
He said, "I was trying to make things work, so I went over and put my arm around him. I said, 'David, it's a big day. But you can't shove, push, or humiliate people who aren't allowed to defend themselves.'"
George alleged that, afterward, David got angry and physically attacked him. He said Three Kings was "truly, without exception, the worst experience of [his] life."
David denied attacking him.
2.In 2016, Amy Adams told British GQ that David O. Russell made her cry on the set of American Hustle. She said, "He did. He was hard on me, that's for sure. It was a lot. I was really just devastated on set. I mean, not every day, but most."
She also said, "Even I was surprised on American Hustle, because on [his previous film] Silver Linings Playbook he had developed this wild, crazy way of working with Bradley [Cooper] and Jennifer [Lawrence]... and it was mania. I was like: wow."
She described how he'd scream at the actors during scenes. She said, "I did a scene with Bradley where I have to hit him and he's yelling at me, 'Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! Hit him! HARDER! HARDER! HARDER! Really give it to him this time!'"
She also clarified that, no matter how successful the movie was, the director's methods weren't okay. She said, "It's not OK with me. Life to me is more important than movies...It really taught me how to separate work and home. Because I was like, I cannot bring this experience home with me to my daughter."
3.In 2024, Sally Field told Vulture that Steel Magnolias director Herbert Ross "was very, very, very hard on Julia [Roberts]." She said, "If you ever talk to Julia, she’ll tell you. We would all rally around Julia, because she was the baby. She was sort of the newcomer. And she was wonderful, and he just picked on her. It was awful."
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images, Jack Mitchell / Getty Images
She said he picked on Julia "because he could be a real son of a bitch, that’s why."
She continued, "Some people just need to have somebody they pick on. But we all came to her aid, and I remember Dolly [Parton] once just turned on him — always with humor, but usually the most vulgar humor you ever heard so that it was like, you just literally don’t have a leg to stand on."
She also said he "dared not" treat her the way he treated Julia.
4.In a since-deleted 2017 Facebook post, Elliot Page alleged that, when he was 18, X-Men: The Last Stand Brett Ratner outed him and made a sexual comment about him to someone else during a cast and crew "meet and greet."
Phillip Faraone / FilmMagic / Via Getty, Gotpap / GC Images / Via Getty
He said, "I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened. I looked down at my feet, didn’t say a word and watched as no one else did either. This man, who had cast me in the film, started our months of filming at a work event with this horrific, unchallenged plea. He 'outed' me with no regard for my well-being, an act we all recognize as homophobic. I proceeded to watch him on set say degrading things to women."
Later in the post, Elliot said, "I got into an altercation with Brett at a certain point. He was pressuring me, in front of many people, to don a t-shirt with 'Team Ratner' on it. I said no and he insisted. I responded, 'I am not on your team.' Later in the day, producers of the film came to my trailer to say that I 'couldn’t talk like that to him.' I was being reprimanded, yet he was not being punished nor fired for the blatantly homophobic and abusive behavior we all witnessed. I was an actor that no one knew. I was eighteen and had no tools to know how to handle the situation."
5.In 2020, Ray Fisher tweeted, "Joss [Whedon]'s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable. He was enabled, in many ways, by [producers] Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Accountability>Entertainment."
Karwai Tang / WireImage / Via Getty, Paul Archuleta / Getty Images
In 2021, Ray told The Hollywood Reporter that, after taking over from Zack Snyder, the director cut his characters' important backstory and was dismissive of him.
After Ray's tweet, Warner sources reportedly claimed Zack was manipulating him. However, Ray said, "The assertion that a Black man would not have his own agency is just as racist as the conversations [Warners leadership] was having about the Justice League reshoots. I’ve been underestimated at every turn during this process and that is what has led us to this point. Had they taken me as seriously as they should have from the beginning, they would not have made as many foolish mistakes as they did in the process."
WarnerMedia, investigated the allegations made by Ray and others who worked on the movie and took "remedial action" as a result.
6.In 2016, Tippi Hendren told NPR that The Birds and Marnie director Alfred Hitchcock's treatment of her "became such a problem for [her] that [she] demanded to get out of the contract."
She said, "And he said, 'Well, you can't, you have your daughter to support and your parents are getting older.' And I said, 'They wouldn't want me in a situation in which I'm not happy.' And he said, 'Well, I'll ruin your career.' And he did. He just kept me under contract, paying me my salary, a lot of directors and producers wanted me for their film, but to get to me, they had to go through him."
She also alleged he groped her in a taxi. She said, "It was an unpleasant situation and very embarrassing for me. And there were about three more of those incidents, and I said, 'I want to get out of the contract.'"
In 2017, she told Variety that he became cold towards her after she rejected his sexual advances. She said, "It was absolutely awful, and as soon as the movie Marnie was over, I was out of there. That was the end of the Hitchcock relationship. I finished the movie and didn’t have any other contact.”
7.In 2007, Jake Gyllenhaal told the New York Times that Zodiac director David Fincher "paints with people." He said, "It's tough to be a color."
Then, in 2020, the director told the New York Times, "Jake was in the unenviable position of being very young and having a lot of people vie for his attention, while working for someone who does not allow you to take a day off. I believe you have to have everything out of your peripheral vision. [But] I think Jake's philosophy was informed by — look, he'd made a bunch of movies, even as a child, but I don't think he'd ever been asked to concentrate on minutiae, and I think he was very distracted.
He had a lot of people whispering that Jarhead was going to be this massive movie and put him in this other league, and every weekend, he was being pulled to go to the Santa Barbara Film Festival and the Palm Springs Film Festival and the [expletive] Catalina Film Festival. And when he'd show up for work, he was very scattered."
He also said Jake had his "managers and his silly agents who were all coming to his trailer at lunch to talk to him about the cover of GQ and this and that. He was being nibbled to death by ducks and not particularly smart ducks. They got in his vision, and it was hard for him to hit the fastball."
8.In 2015, Burt Reynolds told GQ that he likely wouldn't work with Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson again because "personality-wise, [they] didn't fit."
Mike Windle / Via Getty, Gregg Deguire / Getty Images
He said, "I think mostly because he was young and full of himself. Every shot we did, it was like the first time [that shot had ever been done]. I remember the first shot we did in Boogie Nights, where I drive the car to Grauman's Theater. After he said, 'Isn't that amazing?' And I named five pictures that had the same kind of shot. It wasn't original. But if you have to steal, steal from the best."
9.In 2009, Megan Fox called out Transformers franchise director Michael Bay. She told Wonderland magazine, "He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is."
She continued, "So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward. He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant. Shia [LaBeouf] and I almost die when we make a Transformers movie. He has you do some really insane things that insurance would never let you do."
In 2011, Michael Bay told GQ, "[In rehearsals, Megan] was in a different world, on her BlackBerry. You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven [Spielberg] said, 'Fire her right now.'...I wasn't hurt, because I know that's just Megan. Megan loves to get a response. And she does it in kind of the wrong way. I'm sorry, Megan. I'm sorry I made you work twelve hours. I'm sorry that I'm making you show up on time. Movies are not always warm and fuzzy."
Steven Spielberg denied telling the director to fire Megan.
In the franchise's third film, she was replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
10.On a 2024 episode of Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist, Hannah Waddingham recalled calling out the Les Misérables director over how he treated the background and ensemble performers, who mostly came from the theater world, differently than the leading talent, who were mainly Hollywood A-listers. She said, "Tom Hooper and I had a gentle falling out because he asked somebody else to get all us musical theater people to bring it down, and I heard it, and I'd had enough. And because I was just doing one scene, I thought: 'I'm just gonna have to say something,' and I said: 'Can I just stop you there?'"
Karwai Tang / WireImage / Via Getty, Belinda Jiao / Getty Images
She continued, "I just had enough, at this point, of feeling like I should be grateful for a scene in this and a scene in that, and it'll add up, and eventually, something will happen. I just had enough of it.
I say: 'You do realize that this girl here is playing Fantine, the whole role, in the West End at the moment? Every night? This girl here is currently playing Elphaba… And we're all here doing one scene for the greater good of this movie. Can I remind you that all these people, you wouldn't have a film to direct unless people were in the West End or Broadway. It is a total vocation. You wouldn't have a film to direct if we didn't do the hard work on stage. If you want us to take it down, ask us to take it down.'"
She said that the director listened, and they later laughed about the confrontation.
She said, "We were fine after that, but I just thought: 'No, don't presume that people in theater can only do that, ask us to do that — ask us to just do nothing, give people a chance to prove themselves, don't write us all off!'"
11.In 2020, Olivia Munn told Variety that Bryan Singer left in the middle of filming X-Men. She said, "I never shot a huge movie like that before. I didn't know what was right or wrong, but I did know that it seems strange that Bryan Singer could check out and say he had a thyroid issue. Instead of going to a doctor in Montreal, which is a very high-level, working city, he said he had to go to LA. And he was gone for about 10 days is my recollection. And he said, 'Continue. Keep filming.' We'd be on set, I remember there's a big scene that we'd have, and we'd come back from lunch and then one of Bryan's assistants would come up and show us a cellphone with a text message on it."
Raymond Hall / GC Images / Via Getty, Albert L. Ortega / Getty Images
She continued, "And he texted to the actors, 'Hey guys. I'm busy right now. But just go ahead and start filming without me.' And we'd be like, 'OK.' And I never thought any of it was normal, but I didn't realize that other people also thought it wasn't normal. And the other people who thought it wasn't normal would be people at high levels, people who make decisions on whether to hire this person.
Come to find out it is really strange and it wasn't OK. But this person is allowed to continue to go on. Fox still gives him Bohemian Rhapsody, and then we all know what happened."
He was reportedly fired from Bohemian Rhapsody for clashing with lead actor Rami Malik and for not showing up at work, which he denied. At the time, he was also facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denied.
12.In 2019, Rami Malek, who worked with Bryan Singer on Bohemian Rhapsody before the director was reportedly fired, told The Hollywood Reporter, "In my situation with Bryan, it was not pleasant, not at all. And that's about what I can say about it at this point."
Karwai Tang / WireImage / Via Getty, Kevin Winter / Getty Images
Alluding to the director's sexual misconduct allegations, Rami added, "For anyone who is seeking any solace in all of this, Bryan Singer was fired. Bryan Singer was fired. I don't think that was something anyone saw coming, but I think that had to happen, and it did."
He also said, "My heart goes out to anyone who has to live through anything like what I've heard and what is out there. It's awful, it's remarkable that this happens, I can appreciate so much what they've been through and how difficult this must be for them. In the light of the #MeToo era that this somehow seems to exist after that, it's a horrible thing."
13.In 2020, Halle Berry, who worked with Bryan Singer in the X-Men franchise, told Variety, "Bryan's not the easiest dude to work with. I mean, everybody's heard the stories — I don't have to repeat them — and heard of his challenges and what he struggles with. I would sometimes be very angry with him," she continues. I got into a few fights with him, said a few cuss words out of sheer frustration. When I work, I'm serious about that. And when that gets compromised, I get a little nutty. But at the same time, I have a lot of compassion for people who are struggling with whatever they're struggling with, and Bryan struggles."
Kayla Oaddams / WireImage / Via Getty, Smxrf / GC Images / Via Getty
She continued, "Sometimes, because of whatever he's struggling with, he just didn't always feel present. He didn't feel there. And we're outside in our little X-Men stage, freezing our ass off in Banff, Canada, with subzero weather, and he's not focusing. And we're freezing. You might get a little mad."
The director declined to comment for the Variety article.
14.And finally, appearing on The Hollywood Reporter's 2022 Actress Roundtable, Jennifer Lawrence talked about how working with female directors differed from working with male directors. She said, "It was incredible to not be around toxic masculinity — to get a little break from it. And it did always just make us laugh about how we ended up with, 'Women shouldn't be in roles like this because we're so emotional.' I mean, I've worked with Bryan Singer [on four X-Men films]. I've seen emotional men. I've seen the biggest hissy fits thrown on set."
She continued, "[Lila Neugebauer] my third female director, and they are the calmest, best decision-makers I've ever worked with. I absolutely love working with female directors."
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
