When you're a young artist, it's easy to be driven by your passion and ideals. When you're a bit older, eh, sometimes a job is a job. The kids are in college, the roof needs repairs, so why not take a gig in a genre project and pick up a few bucks? Sure, if you pick wrong you might have a miserable time, and if you pick really wrong you might appear in one of the worst movies ever, but either way, it'll all be over in a few months. And after that, you can do as these 12 stars did and let everyone know what you really thought of it. Note, though, that these aren't all bad performances — far from it. After all, when you're an experienced thespian like the ones below, a paycheck performance doesn't necessarily have to mean low-effort.
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Alec Guinness, "Star Wars"
The crowning example of this trend is Sir Alec Guinness, who apparently loathed every moment he spent as Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars." Though Guinness's profit-sharing agreement meant that the film eventually made him a very rich man, he spent much of its production moaning and groaning about Obi-Wan's "ropy" dialogue and unclear motivation. As he wrote in his diary, "Apart from the money, I regret having embarked on the film. I like them well enough, but it's not an acting job, the dialogue — which is lamentable — keeps being changed and only slightly improved, and I find myself old and out of touch with the young." A recently unearthed letter from the set reports the same sentiments. "New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper," Guinness told a friend. "None of it makes my character clear or even bearable." Time did not make him more sentimental about the experience: In a memoir, Guinness told a jolly story about bringing a child to tears by asking him to never watch "Star Wars"again. As he summed up the incident: "I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."
Ian McShane, "Game of Thrones"
Ian McShane is bringing his swaggering charm to the upcoming season of "Game of Thrones," playing a character whose identity has been kept officially under wraps. But in an interview with the BBC, the "Deadwood" star gave a few hints about his role, and ended up dropping a medium-size spoiler about events to come. Don't yell at him about it; he really didn't care. "I was accused of giving the plot away," McShane told the Telegraph afterward. "But I just think, get a f---ing life. It's only tits and dragons." Still, he seems to have taken the part on a lark: "They said it would only be for one episode, so I said, 'So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I'm in.'" But will he be killed by a tit or a dragon?
Stephen Dillane, "Game of Thrones"
Part of McShane's initial interest in "Game of Thrones" came from what he thought was the opportunity to act alongside his old pal Stephen Dillane. Sadly, that was not to be, as Dillane's Stannis Baratheon was killed off at the end of season five. But what a coincidence! That same week, Dillane gave an interview to Radio Times, in which he admitted that he didn't watch the show — too "brutal"— and also revealed that he mostly took the gig for the money. "Money is the main thing I got out of it," he explained. "It's an odd situation. There is a kind of etiquette around these things." Still, Dillane was adamant that he didn't want to trash the fantasy series, which he called "an amazing phenomenon." And besides, he had some good times on the set, praising "the nice people, the craic [Irish for fun] ... hanging out in Belfast with [Liam] Cunningham and Carice [van Houten] and the guys from Castle Black." Learning that Stannis had a jolly good time filming "GoT" just makes you appreciate Dillane's acting even more, doesn't it?
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