5 Actors (Not Bette!) Nobody Liked Working With




Throughout Hollywood history, there have been a huge number of stars who could be classed as “hell-raising actors.” After all, the celebrity and riches that come with working in the movies can make fame go to people’s heads pretty easily, and that kind of spotlight can be hard to deal with in a healthy way.

This can lead to a lot of stars trying to manage both the fun parts of the job and its stressors in the same way: by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Naturally, this is usually a bad idea, and plenty of stars have found themselves in hot water over the years with co-stars and crew members for their bad behaviour while intoxicated.

Of course, hell-raising doesn’t just have to be assisted by substances, tough. Some actors can be perfectly poorly-behaved all of their own accord, and this list includes a couple of guys who have simply acted like jerks for much of their careers.

From alcohol-induced violence to crazy method antics, and from psychological power plays to racist slurs and eating live insects on-set, absolutely nobody liked working with these five hell-raising actors.

Val Kilmer
In 2022, Val Kilmer made a moving cameo in Top Gun: Maverick as his beloved character ‘Iceman’, and there were few dry eyes in the house. After all, Kilmer has been to hell and back in recent years in his battle with throat cancer, which has rendered him unable to speak. When the documentary Val was released, which featured extensive footage of Kilmer and his family in his private life and behind the scenes on movie sets, it was a fitting tribute to an actor who was once on top of the world.

However, the goodwill felt for Kilmer these days hasn’t entirely erased the memories many have of what derailed his career in the first place. In the ’90s, when Kilmer was riding high from starring in Tombstone, Batman Forever, and Heat, he began to build a reputation of being extremely unpredictable and difficult to work with. In fact, it’s believed he once told co-star Kevin Jarre, “As you know, I have a reputation for being difficult, but only with stupid people” – right after eating a live locust right in front of the shocked actor for no apparent reason.

Kilmer notoriously got into repeated bust-ups with Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher, even engaging in a physical shoving match with the beloved director. Schumacher publicly called Kilmer rude, inappropriate, childish, impossible, and even psychotic before he refused to hire him again for the sequel Batman & Robin. He had a similarly combative relationship with The Island of Doctor Moreau director John Frankenheimer, who resorted to bellowing, “Now get that bastard off my set” when the shoot wrapped. Frankenheimer later quipped, “I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again.”

Chevy Chase
In 2012, Chevy Chase lamented, “Nobody prepares you for what happens when you get famous, and I didn’t handle it well.” For someone like Chase, this was code for, “Nobody stopped me being a terrible person to anyone and everyone I worked with for the majority of my career, and now I’m sad because it’s come back to bite me in the ass.” You see, 2012 was the year Chase got himself fired from hit sitcom Community for using a racial slur during an argument with creator Dan Harmon. It caused several of his co-stars to reveal how awful he was to work with, but in truth, Chase had been behaving the same way from the second he broke out in the ’70s on Saturday Night Live.

While plying his trade on SNL, Chase reportedly pissed off and upset a host of his co-stars, including John Belushi and Gilda Radner. He was known to be a bully – the kind of person who would zero in on a sensitivity he knew someone had and mercilessly tease them about it in front of everyone. He persistently joked that openly gay cast member Terry Sweeney should star in a sketch in which he was weighed to see if he had contracted AIDS and instantly slapped his self-proclaimed biggest fan in the world, comedian Rob Huebel, in the face upon meeting him.

Chase’s most famous hellraising moment came when he got into a fistfight backstage at SNL with Bill Murray. Chase argued that Belushi – who hated his guts – had poisoned Murray against him, and it erupted into a fight. In the SNL history Live From New York, Chase claimed he had “grown up on the edge of East Harlem” and “been in a lot of fistfights,” which is funny for anyone who knows he’s actually from an upper middle-class New York family. Either way, Murray and Chase reportedly buried the hatchet over the years.

Bill Murray
In Live From New York, Bill Murray opined, “When you become famous, you’ve got like a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got like two years to pull it together — or it’s permanent.” Murray was ostensibly talking about his old frenemy Chase, but the quote could easily have applied to himself, as well. That’s because countless people have accused Murray over the years of abusive, difficult behaviour – and those fisticuffs with Chase are far from the only time his antics turned physical.

In 2018, Murray experienced the same thing Chase did in 2012 – repercussions for his actions. Production on the movie Being Mortal was shut down due to reports of his “inappropriate behaviour,” and anyone who had any experience working with Murray probably thought, “Yeah, that sounds like Bill.” For instance, Richard Dreyfuss told Yahoo! that Murray was “an Irish drunken bully” on the set of What About Bob? He claimed, “He put his face next to me, nose-to-nose, and he screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘Everyone hates you! You are tolerated!’” Worse than that, though, was the time Dreyfuss claimed a drunken Murray hurled a glass ashtray at his head, which miraculously missed and hit the wall.

Sadly, Murray’s hellraising antics weren’t just reserved for co-stars and crew members he didn’t really know. Instead, he also made life miserable for people who were supposed to be his longtime friends. For example, he pushed Ghostbusters co-star and Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis so far that the normally placid Ramis threw him up against the wall while working on that time loop comedy classic. The two former pals then didn’t speak for 20 years, until Murray finally reached out while Ramis was dying.

Nick Nolte
In 1992, Nick Nolte was named People magazine’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive.’ However, over the next several decades, his well-publicised substance abuse problems and run-ins with the law would ravage his body and career in equal measure. When he worked with Julia Roberts on 1994’s I Love Trouble, she reportedly disliked working with him so much that he disgusted her. She told the New York Times, “From the moment I met him we sort of gave each other a hard time. He’s completely charming and very nice, [but] he’s also completely disgusting. He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems to go out of his way to repel people.”

This wasn’t the first time a female co-star was disgusted by Nolte, though. In 1986’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, his method antics shocked Bette Midler, who couldn’t believe it when he refused to shower for days on end and ate dog food in his attempt to properly portray homeless man Jerry Baskin. Even more shockingly, though, Nolte supposedly used heroin for eight weeks in order to portray a heroin-addicted cop in 2002’s The Good Thief.

Despite his years of hard-drinking, hard-drugging, and hard-partying, Nolte has managed to survive into his 80s, and still turns in compelling performances from time to time. However, he admitted in his 2018 memoir Rebel, “I’ve got five years or so before I, too, get to head ‘elsewhere’ to be rebellious and cause more glorious havoc.”

Tobey Maguire
If you only associate Tobey Maguire with his morally upstanding and almost childishly sincere performance as Peter Parker in the Spider-Man movies, then it might shock you to find out that he has always had a bad reputation in Hollywood. Over the years, plenty of co-stars have revealed that he was hard to work with, including Charlize Theron, who said, “Tobey and I had a bit of a rough time” on the Cider House Rules set. He has also been known to have very public outbursts at the paparazzi, which isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, as they can be vultures.

However, the biggest indicator that there may be a darkness at the heart of Maguire that the public has never really seen is the 2017 movie Molly’s Game. That Jessica Chastain-starring movie is based on the real stories of Molly Bloom, a woman who ran a high-stakes underground poker game for the Hollywood elite in the ’00s. In the film, Michael Cera plays a despicable character known as ‘Player X’ who delights in trying to destroy his fellow player’s lives. It later came out that the character was based on Maguire, who was a regular at Bloom’s games.

In Bloom’s memoir, she claimed that Maguire grew increasingly toxic over a period of time when he interacted with her, and eventually orchestrated her being removed from the games. She also wrote about a sinister night where he would only hand over a thousand-dollar chip to her if she did something to “earn” it. The nervous Bloom asked what he meant, and he reportedly grinned, “Get up on that desk and bark like a seal.” As she became more and more embarrassed in front of the other celebrities in the room, Maguire kept pushing, saying, “I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand dollars? Wow, you must be really rich.” She refused to bow to his manipulation, but the damage was already done.

Share A little Divinity

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.