Bill Murray – “Garfield”
Famously, Bill Murray says he didn’t voice the famously lazy lasagna-loving cat in the live-action/CGI “Garfield” for the money. Well, not just for the money (he did get the studio to up their original offer of $50,000 by quite a significant way), but he also received the script, which said Joel Coen on the front. “Christ, well I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah I’d like to do that,” Murray told GQ a few years on. Months and months later, he went to loop his lines for the movie, and looked on in horror. “I worked all day and kept going, ‘That’s the line? Well, I can’t say that.’ And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, ‘Okay, you better show me the rest of the movie, so we can see what we’re dealing with.’ So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, ‘Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?’ And then they explained it to me: It wasn’t written by that Joel Coen.” Murray’s mistake, it turned out, was mixing the co-director of “Fargo” up with the screenwriter behind “Toy Story,” “Money Talks,” “Evan Almighty” and “Daddy Day Camp.” Still, the new knowledge, and his audibly disinterested turn in the first film, didn’t stop Murray cashing in again for the 2006 sequel ‘A Tail Of Two Kitties‘ (though amusingly, in his cameo as himself in “Zombieland,” when asked if he has any regrets, he answers, “Garfield”).
Nick Nolte – “The Ridiculous 6”
From his early days as a leading man in “The Deep” and “48 Hrs.,” to being People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1992, to the grizzled character-actor fave today, Nick Nolte’s career has had plenty of ups and downs — just a year after he voiced a character in “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge Of Kitty Galore,” he was an Oscar nominee for “Warrior.” But Nolte’s rarely taken on something quite so beneath him as he did with his last movie role: Adam Sandler’s “The Ridiculous 6,” the first of the comedy star’s Netflix movies. Sandler’s always had a strange relationship with surprisingly respectable talent — John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel all pop up here, and have worked with Sandler multiple times before — but even so, it’s a little surprising that Nolte agreed to take part in this weak-sauce “Magnificent Seven” parody, a film whose sole reason for existence appears to be to make “A Million Ways To Die In The West” look marginally better. Nolte plays the father of the six semi-outlaws — Sandler, Terry Crews, Jorge Garcia, Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider and Luke Wilson — and he’s on particularly confused form here, though who could really blame him?
Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance – “The Gunman”
To paraphrase one of the biggest movies of our lifetimes, you either die a hero, or you live long enough to give in to your agent’s nagging that you should do a Liam Neeson and make a quickie Euro-action movie. And so it came to pass that Sean Penn, an actor known these days almost exclusively for heavy dramas, teamed with “Taken” director Pierre Morel for “The Gunman.” Arriving a couple of years after the similarly sell-out-y “Gangster Squad,” where Penn goes full “Dick Tracy” with the worst performance of his career as Mickey Cohen, this looked like a more credible, sober project on paper, a loosely John Le Carré-ish affair about a retired, guilt-ridden mercenary who’s lured back into action. But in practice, it’s a sluggish and utterly generic actioner, indistinguishable from a Chuck Norris film except for the politics that presumably drew Penn to the project. More baffling still is that the film has a remarkably distinguished supporting cast, presumably drawn by Penn’s credibility — Ray Winstone and Idris Elba might have done this sort of thing before, but Javier Bardem and Mark Rylance (as the big bad, who is hilariously despatched by being gored to death by a bull) rarely go down this kind of road. And perhaps rightly so, because everyone’s actually kind of actively bad in the film too.
Robert Redford – “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Marvel never had too much difficulty in attracting good actors to play their villains or supporting roles, but a certain cheapness with wages to begin with likely put something of a cap on it — Jeff Bridges was in “Iron Man” after a lull of few years, just before his “Crazy Heart” Oscar, while William Hurt and Anthony Hopkins haven’t always been massively discerning with their choices. But a few years into their project, things changed: virtually no actor was out of reach, be it a recent Oscar winner like Brie Larson or Lupita Nyong’o, or massively acclaimed actors like Glenn Close, Tilda Swinton or Cate Blanchett, people who a few years ago wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a superhero movie. And the tipping point might have been when Robert Redford signed on to “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Redford, one of the last true screen legends of his generation, had only made a handful of movies in the ten years beforehand, and certainly no megabudget tentpoles like this. And whether it was the attraction of a big payday or something else that attracted him (Redford expressed some interest in seeing how the big-budget movie worked from the inside, saying he “wanted to experience this new form of filmmaking”), it essentially flung the doors wide open for the studio as far as the talent it attracted went.
Tim Robbins – “Green Lantern”
Though principally a serious actor whose directorial efforts like “Dead Man Walking” are just as high-minded in terms of their subject matter, Tim Robbins has nevertheless always had a sense of fun — he started out with lighter fare like “The Sure Thing” and “Bull Durham,” and is a friend of, and occasional collaborator with, people like Jack Black and Mike Myers, cameoing in films like “Austin Powers” and “Anchorman.” His turn in “Green Lantern,” however, remains sort of inexcusable, somehow putting a worse superhero movie on his CV than “Howard The Duck.” It might seem unfair to call Robbins out, given that he was hardly the only respected actor to take the WB dollar and suffer through their misguided superhero movie (Peter Sarsgaard at his most John Malkovich-y, Angela Bassett, Geoffrey Rush, Mark Strong). But it feels egregious partly because Robbins takes this kind of paycheck so rarely, and partly because the role makes so little sense: he plays the Senator father of Sarsgaard’s villain (despite being barely a decade older than the other actor, and visibly so), a character who serves virtually no meaningful role in the story and gives the great Oscar-winning actor absolutely no material to stick his teeth into. No wonder Robbins has avoided blockbusters since.