10 Actors Who Admit They Hated Their On-Screen Characters

Some of the most well-known television and movie characters are beloved by many across the world—except maybe the actors and actresses who played them. Although these Hollywood stars were fortunate to nab major roles and have even become hugely successful because of them, they don’t always see eye-to-eye with the characters that made them household names. Sometimes, their negative feelings weren’t so much towards the characterization of the role they were playing, but the performances they gave while on screen. Other times, these roles lead them to be typecast, which can be a challenge for actors to successfully remove themselves from. From Robert Pattinson, who, while the movies were in their prime, didn’t hide his animosity for his Twilight vampire alter ego to Daniel Radcliffe, who has been quite critical of some of his Harry Potter performances, keep scrolling to see which actors disliked the roles they played.

1. Zac Efron

Troy Bolton - High School Musical

"High School Musical" Press Conference

Photo: Getty Images

We might still love the iconic 2006 Disney channel film series, High School Musical 1-3, however our main protagonist doesn’t quite share the sentiment. “I step back and look at myself and I still want to kick that guy’s ass sometimes," Efron once told Men's Fitness.

2. Rob Pattinson

Edward Cullen - Twilight

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Despite the movie’s huge success, as well as the actors showing their enthusiasm and gratitude for being given the chance to be involved in the mega-franchise, there is probably no one who despised their character in the Twilight series more than Rob Pattinson, who played Edward Cullen. We have to give it to Rob for his brutal honesty whenever he was asked about the film during interviews. In one interview, Cullen compared his character to an axe murderer rather than the perfect teenage heartthrob that many fans view him as. Now that the Twihard hysteria has died down, Rob looks back to his time as a vampire heartthrob fondly.

3. Blake Lively

Serena van der Woodsen- Gossip Girls

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One of Lively’s best known roles Serena van der Woodsen, the wealthy socialite who dominated New York City's Upper East Side with Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) for six seasons on The CW's Gossip Girl. Despite the glamour and success involved in playing the character, Lively admits that separating fantasy and reality while playing as Woodsen hasn't always been so easy. She even went as far as to move away from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan just so that she and her family could stay firmly planted in reality. "All this stuff isn't real life. This is my job and this is what I do for a chunk of the year, but my personal life is not my professional life. So, you know, I think that's the way that it doesn't become you, or you don't become it,” she tells BuzzFeed.

4. Andrew Lincoln

Mark - Love Actually

'Love Actually' London Premiere

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Fans of the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually gushed over the movie's most famous scene when Mark (Andrew Lincoln) shows up at Juliet's (Keira Knightley) doorstep to silently profess his love to her using handmade cue cards. Years after performing his role as Mark, Lincoln admitted to Entertainment Weekly in an interview that he couldn’t help but feel a little weirded out the choices made by his character. “The story is set up like a prism looking at all the different qualities of love. Mine was unrequited. So I got to be this weird stalker guy,” he said.

5. Jamie Dornan

Christian Grey - 50 Shades Of Grey 

Photo: Universal Pictures

Despite the craze caused by his role as Christian Grey in the 2015 film 50 Shades of Grey, Dornan constantly criticizes the film as well as his character in terms of how unrealistic he feels both are.

6. Kate Winslet

Rose - Titanic

Kate Winslet And Leonardo DiCaprio In 'Titanic'

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While Winslet doesn't hate the Titanic film as a whole, she isn’t very happy with her overall performance as Rose when looking back. "Every single scene, I'm like 'Really, really? You did it like that? Oh my God...Even my American accent, I can't listen to it. It's awful," she told The Telegraph. "Hopefully it's so much better now. It sounds terribly self indulgent but actors do tend to be very self-critical. I have a hard time watching any of my performances, but watching Titanic I was just like, 'Oh God, I want to do that again.'"

7. Penn Badgley

Joe Goldberg - You

"You" New York Series Premiere

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Although Badgley’s character on the popular Netflix show is a legit stalker, fans of the show are still smitten with Joe Goldberg despite his alarming behavior throughout the season. A few times, the actor has taken to Twitter to bring back down to Earth and opened up about his feelings on his character Joe on The Today Show. “He’s a pretty reprehensible guy. You start to discover his true motives pretty early on — eight minutes into the show. And he’s a guy who’s capable of stalking, he’s a guy who’s capable of murder, he’s a guy who’s capable of a lot of manipulation and abuse,” he said. 

8. Daniel Radcliffe

Harry Potter - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

"Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince" Premiere - Inside Arrivals

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Radcliffe confessed in an interview with Playboy that he doesn't like watching Half-Blood Prince, the sixth film of the Harry Potter series. "I'm just not very good in it. I hate it...my acting is very one-note and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn't come across. My best film is the fifth one (Order of the Phoenix) because I can see a progression."

9. Miley Cyrus

Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart - Hannah Montana

Disney's "Hannah Montana" - Season Three

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It is common for former child stars to comment on the pressure that was put on them in order to fit high industry standards and Miley Cyrus was unfortunately, no exception. While she didn’t reference hatred for her character explicitly, she did talk about how the role had a negative effect on her overall mentality. “I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show," Cyrus told Marie Claire in a 2015 interview. "I was made to look like someone that I wasn’t, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn’t on that show, it was like, Who the f*** am I?” She said.

10. Mariah Carey

Billie Frank - Glitter

Screening of Mariah Carey's Glitter

Photo: Getty Images

The pop icon was quite accomplished in the music world when she laid an egg in the 2001 box-office bomb, Glitter where she played herself. Days before the film’s release, Carey was suddenly hospitalized due to "extreme exhaustion" and "physical and emotional breakdown". Almost two decades later, she told Complex the whole experience “almost ruined my life” and that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder around the same time.


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