Cameron Diaz – “The Counselor” (2013)
Her career has seen flashes of darkness — “Vanilla Sky,” “Gangs Of New York,” “The Box” — but for the most part, Cameron Diaz’s career has mostly seen her specialize in comedic fare. Films like “There’s Something About Mary,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Shrek” and “The Holiday” helped to make her one of the most beloved light comediennes since Lucille Ball. Which, for all her previous departures into dramatic territory, made her appearance in Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” all the more surprising, given that it’s maybe the bleakest movie to be released by a major studio in years. An original script by the great Cormac McCarthy, it sees Diaz cast against type as Malkina, a psychopathic, cheetah-owning girlfriend of drug kingpin Reiner (Javier Bardem), who proves to be the film’s greatest threat, and greatest survivor. Oh, and she also fucks a car at one point. It’s a great role on paper, a villain who could sit alongside Anton Chigurh in “No Country For Old Men” or Judge Holden in “Blood Meridian,” and we admire Diaz’s ambition and bravery in taking a part so far outside her comfort zone. But sometimes comfort zones are there for a reason, and Diaz is staggeringly miscast in the part, actively and obviously uncomfortable in the role and with McCarthy’s very particular dialogue, and never feeling particularly threatening either. It doesn’t help that reportedly Diaz shot the movie with a Bajan accent that made her sound like Rihanna, only for the studio to force Scott to get her to redub the performance. We’re not sure which outcome was worse…
Denzel Washington – “Heart Condition” (1990)
Remember that 1990 film about a ghost who helps solve his own murder, and bring romantic closure to his still-living girlfriend? With the Magical Negro character? Yeah, well, not that one. It’s slightly unfair to pick out such an early role from Denzel Washington whose career has mostly been consistent to a fault, but we should remember that by 1990 he’d already appeared in “Cry Freedom” and “Glory” and indeed, about a month after the release of this exceptionally unfunny comedy, he’d win his first Oscar for the latter. Reportedly talked into taking the role against his will by his agent, he plays Napoleon Stone, a well-groomed lawyer who, sigh, is murdered the same day that his arch enemy Mooney, (Bob Hoskins) has a heart attack. The slobbish, virulently racist cop Mooney carries a torch for the good-natured hooker Crystal (Chloe Webb) whom Stone “stole,” so when Mooney discovers not only has he been implanted with his nemesis’ heart but the debonair, cultured, health-conscious lawyer is also a ghost only he can see or hear, he’s pissed. There’s a lot more tiresome nonsense, including a subplot about a dead senator and a surprise in the shape of Crystal’s black baby, but mostly this is bits borrowed better films (“Ghost,” “Untamed Heart,” the makeover montage from “Pretty Woman“). At the time it was a swerve on Washington’s meteoric ascent, and now it feels like an even bigger anomaly in retrospect: a rare comic turn for the predominantly dramatic actor, with an attitude to race that has to have been simplistically tin-eared even 26 years ago. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’d steer clear of the genre after this flop, though when he did make his sole subsequent pure comedy, “The Preacher’s Wife,” interesting to note he’d again play a supernatural entity.
Demi Moore – “The Scarlet Letter” (1995)
Most of the entries on this list are “serious” thesps coming unstuck when they try on an outlandish or obviously paycheck role for size. But Moore’s entry is rather the reverse and to be honest, possibly all the more unintentionally hilarious for it – at the height of her fame as the go-to female lead for erotic thrillers and sexed-up courtroom dramas, Moore made a wild stab for Classic Actress credibility with this (very, very loose) adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s tale of puritan morality, for Roland Joffe, the deeply self-serious director of “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission.” Gary Oldman co-stars as the hunky cleric who knocks her up and Robert Duvall plays her believed-dead husband who returns having gone pretty much cuckoo with bloodlust at the hands of his native captors. Moore’s miscasting is only one of the film’s litany of poor choices – it’s hardly her fault that the script took such liberties with Hawthorne’s classroom text, or that Joffe inserted such a surfeit of ponderous symbolism into a story that is itself, essentially, about a symbol. But Moore does give an entirely anachronistic performance: where original story is about the disproportionate pillorying of a woman struggling with guilt over her transgressions, the film becomes about a bewilderingly modern young woman’s sexy one-upping of the stuffy ol’ Puritans en route to a triumphant ending – that comes courtesy of the deus-ex-machina interruption from the local Native Americans. It’s all so terribly ’90s in its painstakingly progressive view of both race and gender that there’s really not a second you believe Moore as a 16th century emigre, so though it might have been designed to show her breadth as an actress, “The Scarlet Letter” really only displays her limitations.
Marlon Brando – “The Island of Dr Moreau” (1996)
Truly, for those of us lucky enough to have caught it in the theater, one of the most jawdropping of car-crash disasters ever to grace the big screen, John Frankenheimer‘s “Island of Dr Moreau” passed almost instantly into legend for its astoundingly bungled production (here’s a hugely entertaining account by Robbie Collin of The Telegraph). To be fair, there were significant factors behind its catastrophic nature that were beyond anyone’s control: the recent suicide of Brando’s daughter and the pending divorce of co-star Val Kilmer contributing more intense strain to two already notoriously volatile on-set personalities. But of course Brando had signed on long before there was any hint this all would come to pass, taking one of a string of select but regular ’90s appearances following an almost decade-long absence from screens in the 1980s. But the director he supported, Richard Stanley, was replaced by Frankenheimer, and rumors abounded that Brando essentially tried to sabotage the production as a result. Certainly, he did the bare minimum of work, refusing to learn his lines so they had to be fed through a headset that, according to co-star David Thewlis, also picked up police frequencies. The role could have been a great one, part Colonel Kurtz, part Dr. Frankenstein, but Brando’s outlandish, leering, white-faced weirdo is a caricature more than a character. But then, it’s probably exactly what the film deserves, and with so many of his last roles proving sedate and unremarkable, it’s almost a good thing that the mythic, never-knowingly insignificant Brando could have such an unmistakably colossal snafu as part of his late-career output. Almost.
Nicole Kidman – “The Paperboy” (2012)
From grand films that seem like can’t-miss home-runs but turn out terrible (“Grace of Monaco“) to little films that should be bad but end up sublime (“Paddington“), to films that tank initially and turn out to be masterpieces (“Birth“) to films that are loved on release and quickly evaporate (“Cold Mountain“) the presumably fearless Nicole Kidman has one of the most eclectic of resumes. But after decades of zigzagging, she maybe painted her masterpiece in the go-for-broke department, by truly committing to her role in Lee Daniels‘ “The Paperboy.” This swampy, sleazy, trashy take on Pete Dexter‘s novel shows all the worst excesses of Daniels’ subtle-as-a-sledgehammer style, but you have to admire Kidman’s bravado, even as your jaw hovers somewhere around your knees. By the time her Southern vixen Charlotte, poured into a minidress with her heavy make up sliding off her face in the bayou heat, has caused John Cusack‘s no-good convict to ejaculate in his pants from across the room, it’s very clear this movie is not going to take any prisoners in the bad taste stakes. And that scene happens near the beginning! You still have the rough sex/washing machine scene to come with its overtones of rape complicity, and of course the infamous moment when she pisses on Zac Efron. The problem really is that no one can keep up with her, and the bucking bronco of a plot that sees every player undergo some massively dubious soapy revelation (Matthew McConaughey‘s character is raped, David Oyelowo’s turns out to be fake-English etc.) eventually unseats everyone but her. It leaves Kidman carrying the can for this colossal hot mess, for which she deserves either a 21-gun salute or day in the stocks. Or possibly both.
Most of the above films fall into the bizarre-to-bad category, however noble their intentions and however committed the performer, because, let’s face it, they’re kind of fun to write about from time to time. But it should be noted that there are great number of WTF decisions that have yielded much better results: Meryl Streep‘s most outre recent role, outside the run of biopics and Oscar bait dramedies that she’s been involved in of late, was probably Spike Jonze‘s “Adaptation” and she slays in that. Similarly Tom Cruise straying off the jumping-off-exploding-things path for a moment gave us his indelible turn as the repugnant sex guru Frank TJ Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “Magnolia.” And in those two cases certainly, it makes us wish they took a punt on a role that on paper is way outside their wheelhouse, more regularly. Obviously there are a million more we could have chosen, and this is a phenomenon that stretches back all the way into the classic era and beyond (what the hell was John Wayne doing in “The Conqueror“?) but instead we’ll turn it over to you. When was the last time you did a double take at a cast list, or an actor’s seemingly illogical choice of role? Do tell.