Actors Who Took A Big Risk With Controversial Roles
Hollywood is an uncertain place where millions of dollars go flying on whims and actors walk a fine tight rope with a fickle audience. With directors, agents, and producers pulling them every which way, it’s often hard for actors to see what roles will make their legacies shine and which will ruin them.
After all, a role can be controversial for a whole world of reasons. The material can be edgy, the casting choice itself can manage to be offensive, or the public can be convinced with a surprising fervor that they’re just not right for the part. Some won out with a legendary performance, while others either saw their careers end or come frighteningly close. Either way, they took big risks.
Natalie Portman: Léon The Professional
Although the unique story, Jean Reno’s intensely charismatic performance, Natalie Portman’s natural talent and their chemistry made the 1994 Luc Besson film Léon: The Professional an international hit and critical success, the nature of the titular hitman’s relationship with a 13-year-old girl was a matter of intense controversy.
Indeed, as revelations of the kinds of lascivious scenes Besson wanted in the film came to light, the uncomfortable implications behind how close they became have only become more apparent in retrospect. It was a miracle the movie worked as well as it did for everyone involved.
Edward Norton: American History X
For a rising, promising young actor as Edward Norton was in the late ’90s, it’s hard to imagine a prospect more frightening than starring as a member of a White supremacist gang with the last thing a person should want tattooed on his chest. Naturally, the role requires spouting some of the most vile things a person could say about other races and matching those words with violence.
However, there’s nothing Norton seems to love more than a challenge, so he not only threw himself into Derek Vinyard’s hard, uncomfortable path to redemption, but believed so much in the project that he edited it out from under the director. Much to the director’s chagrin, Norton had the studio’s permission.
Daniel Craig: Casino Royale
Considering how long, how capably, and how successfully Daniel Craig played James Bond by the time he stepped away from the role with No Time To Die, it’s easy to forget just how vehemently the public once disagreed with his casting.
Whether it had to do with superficial concerns about his looks, his blonde hair, or his relatively stoic approach to the character, enough people thought he couldn’t be possible for the role that a website was created called Daniel Craig Is Not Bond. Yet, while Craig faced an uphill public relations battle with Casino Royale, his impressive dramatic talents eventually won most people over.
Gary Oldman: Tiptoes
Although Gary Oldman has the uncanny ability to disappear into almost any role, the limits of his capabilities were tested to their breaking point with the 2002 movie Tiptoes, in which he unconvincingly and ill-advisedly plays a little person.
Incredibly, the movie also co-stars a perfectly viable alternative casting choice in the excellent Peter Dinklage. Even more incredibly, Dinklage insisted that they only reason the film turned out so bad was that the studio fired director Matthew Bright and re-edited the movie. Apparently, his director’s cut somehow made Tiptoes work.
Tom Cruise: Interview With The Vampire
Although Anne Rice’s famous vampire, Lestat, is certainly a dark, anti-heroic character in a movie with enough edgy, controversial subject matter that Oprah Winfrey reportedly walked out of an advance screening, that was only part of the risk for Tom Cruise. As it turned out, Rice herself publicly spoke out against his casting, believing that Jeremy Irons or Rutger Hauer would have been a better choice.
As uncomfortable as a situation as that likely was for Cruise, however, it couldn’t have worked out better. Rice admitted that he performed admirably, while Interview With The Vampire provided an avenue for Cruise to more comfortably pursue challenging roles in movies like Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut.
Jodie Foster: Taxi Driver
Although it’s supposed to be as horrifying to the main character as it is to the audience, it’s understandable that easily the most controversial aspect of an already gritty and violent movie is the casting of a 12-year-old Jodie Foster as an underage escort.
While the most risqué scenes Foster was involved in featured her older sister Connie as a body double, that wasn’t exactly widely known. Naturally, that generated significant backlash for the movie, which nonetheless garnered praise for its uncompromising look at the depravity in the margins of major cities.
Jeremy Irons: Lolita
Although the movie wasn’t reputed to be very good, the very idea of remaking the film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita was widely considered a non-starter. Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation has historically attracted controversy of its own, but calls to ban the 1997 remake came out of the public sphere before it even opened.
According to the Oxford Mail, Irons was well aware of the lion’s den he was fixing to walk into while starring as Humbert Humbert, a professor who predates on young Dolores Haze, played here by 15-year-old Dominique Swain. As he said, “For a long time I wasn’t going to do it. I said, I need this film like a hole in the head.”
Willem Dafoe: The Last Temptation Of Christ
Although Willem Dafoe has never been a stranger to edgy, challenging roles, both he and director Martin Scorcese nonetheless took a serious risk with The Last Temptation Of Christ. Not only does this movie portray Jesus as weaker and more reliant on Judas than he’s ever been depicted before, but it shows him giving in to sins of the flesh that most people would never associate with the religious icon.
While it’s true that things aren’t quite what they seem by the end of the movie and Scorcese included the disclaimer, “This film is not based upon the Gospels but on this fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict,” the response saw protests, death threats, and even bannings of the film in Greece, Mexico, and Chile. Defoe was also fired from at least one future project as a direct result of starring in the movie.
Scarlett Johansson: Ghost In The Shell
Although Hollywood has a history of having White actors alter themselves to play characters of other races, that wasn’t quite what ended up happening when Scarlett Johansson played the lead role in Ghost In The Shell. Instead, the fact that she was cast to play a character originally named Motoko Kusanagi in the first place drew intense public backlash beyond the manga and animated movie’s original fandom.
In response, both Johansson and the studio argued that it was different because Kusanagi was an android with an assumed identity, and that the chosen name of Mira Killian could have just as easily been assumed instead. Whether it was due to the controversy or not, the movie underperformed.
Michael Keaton: Batman
Considering that Michael Keaton is now a popular choice for the historically preferred Batman actor, it seems hard to believe that his casting for the role would have ever been controversial. However, it is nonetheless true that the backlash was widespread and passionate when his casting was announced.
Why? Well, Keaton had primarily been known as a comedic actor up to that point, which apparently worried Batman fans that wouldn’t be able to pull off the stoic severity needed for their beloved Caped Crusader. Obviously, that didn’t turn out to be a very well-founded fear.
Jim Caviezel: The Passion Of Christ
As with Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation Of Christ, the backlash Jim Caviezel claimed to experience after playing Jesus in The Passion Of The Christ had less to do with his actual performance and more to do with the wider movie itself.
Yet, while Scorcese knowingly made a transgressive film, director Mel Gibson’s research during filmmaking struck critics like Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News as pushing a subtly but “virulently antisemitic” narrative. After Gibson all but confirmed this suspicion in a 2006 roadside incident, The Guardian has reported that Caviezel claimed to be largely rejected by the movie industry for starring in The Passion Of The Christ.
Tom Hanks: Philadelphia
Although Philadelphia is now considered a watershed movie for bringing anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and AIDS stigma into a matter of national debate and conversation, it was an incredibly risky role for Tom Hanks to take on by 1993.
While it’s sadly true that part of the backlash against Philadelphia came from those who objected to the very idea of portraying a gay man with AIDS as sympathetically as the movie does, it actually ran afoul of LGBTQ+ activists as well. Among these voices was playwright Larry Kramer, who described the movie as inaccurate and unbelievable to the point of urging people not to see it.
Ahmed Best: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Those who still despise Jar Jar Binks and regard him as an offensive stereotype and frequent annoyance during his time in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace have exactly one person to blame for him: The film’s writer and director George Lucas.
However, Ahmed Best can sadly attest that it was he who actually bore the brunt of the character’s backlash, despite performing the part as written with some inspiration from Buster Keaton, Goofy, and a voice he used to entertain his younger cousins. As Best wrote in an emotional social media post with his son at a bridge, “20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about.”
Maddie Ziegler: Music
While there’s a rather long list of reasons Sia’s movie Music attracted the widespread backlash, most of them have to do with this misrepresentation of autism and what support for the relevant community looks like. Most egregiously, it promoted the use of physical restraint techniques during breakdowns that have not only proven to be dangerous but potentially fatal.
Yet, while Sia’s consulting with reviled organization Autism Speaks also left autistic critics less than impressed, Maddie Ziegler’s near-caricature of the titular character was also considered an offensive part of the experience. Sadly, this was a problem Ziegler appeared more aware of than Sia herself, as Slate reported that she wept on the first day of rehearsal, saying, “I don’t want anyone to think I’m making fun of them.”
Robert Downey Jr.: Tropic Thunder
Both at the time and since, the decision to cast Robert Downey Jr. as an actor donning blackface to play a Black character in Tropic Thunder’s movie within a movie has been hotly and seemingly endlessly debated. The movie’s purpose for this unenviable role was to satirize the ways method actors will engage in abhorrent behavior and claim that doing so furthers their art.
Yet, while the movie’s framing of the blackface does communicate that messaging, the common counter-argument is that engaging in the same problematic behavior that you’re criticizing ends up becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution. While the debate will likely never be fully resolved, it also didn’t measurably hurt Tropic Thunder‘s commercial performance or critical reception in any way.
