1.
One of Patricia Arquette's very first roles was in Pretty Smart, when she was only 18. The production was terrible and often filmed through lunch breaks, and when they were fed, the food was dismal. Arquette, a vegetarian, was served meat, and there were few fruits and vegetables because the Chernobyl explosion had occurred recently. "So, they just would bring me, like, a Coke and potatoes. And then I opened it, and there was meat, but it had fur on it." She was responsible for her own wardrobe, and there was no script supervisor to help her keep continuity. After the negative experience, she was considering leaving acting behind, but her sister — Pulp Fiction star Rosanna Arquette — encouraged her to stick with it, informing her that movies were usually better organized.
2.
Like Arquette, Jeffrey Dean Morgan had a terrible experience in an early-ish role. Morgan, who was mostly appearing in one-episode stints of shows at the time, had a brief appearance on Star Trek: Enterprise as an Xindi-Reptilian in 2003. "I hated it so much," he said of playing the sci-fi character, given that he had to spend up to 14 hours a day wearing heavy prosthetics. "I remember I was so claustrophobic. It just was an experience that I want to forget, and I still wake up sweating about it." He was "done" with acting after this, recalling thinking, "That's it. I've got to do something else."
He was already in his mid-30s, and his manager told him he'd "aged out" of his chance to make it. After that manager dropped him, he seriously considered leaving Hollywood. But, Morgan said, he didn't know how to do anything else. Luckily, a few years later, he'd have his breakout role in Grey's Anatomy.
3.
One of Zoe Saldaña's first roles was in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. After an interviewer said that Saldaña "hated" the experience, Saldaña replied, "Those weren't the right people for me. I'm not talking about the cast. The cast was great. I'm talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors. It was a lot of above the line versus below the line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs. It was very elitist."
"I almost quit the business," she revealed. "I was 23 years old, and I was like, 'F—k this!' I am never putting myself in this situation again. People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I'm not important. F—k you." Luckily, she stayed in the industry and became the highest-grossing actor of all time.
4.
Even established actors can have experiences so bad that they consider leaving the industry. Gary Oldman was bored of being "typecast" as the villain after appearing in Lost in Space, calling the project not his "cup of tea" and saying that playing the role was not "stretching." While he later said the movie was "fun" and had a "great cast," he actually stopped acting for over a year after the film. "I've lost the fire for it, I think," he said of acting. "I'm not chomping at the bit to get back to it." His next movie wasn't until two years after Lost in Space came out, and was partly produced by Oldman himself, giving him more control.
5.
Ian McKellen HATED working with green screens while filming The Hobbit series, particularly given that The Lord of the Rings years prior had relied mostly on practical effects and shooting on location. He called his filming experience "miserable," recalling that during LOTR, "If Gandalf was on top of a mountain, I'd be there on the mountain." He also frequently shot alone on soundstages because he needed to appear much larger than the Hobbit characters.
"It was so distressing and off-putting and difficult that I thought 'I don't want to make this film if this is what I'm going to have to do,'" he said. "It's not what I do for a living. I act with other people, I don't act on my own." He said he "thought perhaps, has the time come for me to stop acting altogether if I can't cope with these difficulties?" However, he stuck with it, especially after director Peter Jackson, along with the crew, made a concerted effort to celebrate Gandalf and immerse McKellen in the LOTR world by decorating his tent with props.
6.
Chris Sarandon hated The Sentinel, saying last year in an interview with the Guardian, "Don't get me started. I almost quit the business after that movie." His main issue was with its director, Michael Winner, whom he called "malevolent." He took the role due to the money involved and wanting to play the lead, but says he's "repressed" the actual plot of the film — about a Brooklyn brownstone built over a porthole to hell — which was not popular with critics.
7.
Chad Michael Murray became a breakout star in One Tree Hill, after initially stealing hearts with smaller roles in Gilmore Girls and Dawson's Creek. He stayed on the show for six seasons, leaving in 2009, and considered leaving the industry entirely. However, this was more about the fame than the role itself. "There was a moment where I was quitting. I was done. I just couldn't do it anymore," he later revealed. "It was because, when you're 18 to 25, these formidable years where you're really cutting your teeth on life experiences and your brain isn’t fully developed, you make mistakes. I mean, gosh, we still screw up when we're grown-ups. But I think it's hard for me to see past those moments when you're not adult enough to understand the scenarios that you're in."
Midway through his stint on the show, Murray famously married and then divorced his costar, Sophia Bush, five months later, amidst rumors of cheating. It seems the media exposure took a toll; Murray recalled having "so many eyeballs" on him, saying, "You go to the grocery store and someone points at you, 'Oh, that's the guy that's on the tabloid, or that’s the guy that did this.' Even if they're not talking about that, sometimes your head goes to a negative place, and I know mine really did. And so I just made a big pivot at that point in my life and said, 'You know what? This is not what I want.'" Murray did not work much in the following few years, though he appeared in a couple of TV movies. "I took a lot of time to reassess it all," he said. "It took years of talking to people much smarter than me to get where I wanted to go."
8.
Jacob Elordi similarly wanted to quit being an actor after skyrocketing to fame following the release of The Kissing Booth. "I hated being a character to the public. I felt so far from myself," Elordi told GQ, recalling the first time he was photographed by paparazzi. "It felt like, all of a sudden, I was a poster. Like I was a billboard," he continued. "It felt like it was for sale. Then my brain went through the fucking wringer. Like, I wasn’t sure if I was genuine. It really skews your view. … It creates a very paranoid way of living."
9.
Christian Bale had a similar experience after finding fame at such a young age, starring in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun at just 13. "I had really enjoyed my anonymity before that," he said in an interview with NJ. "But now, everyone was looking at me. Anonymity is so essential to your growth as a child because it's a time for putting it all to the test, pushing boundaries, seeing how far you can take things. And I lost that."
He even considered quitting, and though ultimately he persevered, he seems to have mixed thoughts about it. "I felt I dealt with it fairly well at the time, but I had problems. I wasn't happy. And, you know, I can't help looking at it now and saying there's a point at which a child acting just becomes abuse. I really think it can just kill all the enjoyment a child is getting from it, and I look at it now with unease. Maybe there are some wonderful people, but me, I always suspect someone who wants to make their money from children."
10.
Margot Robbie also struggled with the pressures of sudden fame after starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, especially when it came to the loss of privacy. "Something was happening in those early stages and it was all pretty awful, and I remember saying to my mom, 'I don’t think I want to do this.' And she just looked at me, completely straight-faced, and was like, 'Darling, I think it’s too late not to.' That's when I realized the only way was forward."
11.
Michael Cera almost quit acting after Superbad due to the fame. "I didn't know how to handle walking down the street," he said. "Fame makes you very uncomfortable in your own skin, and makes you paranoid and weird. ... When you're a kid, people also feel they can kind of grab you — they’re not that respectful of you or your physical space. I didn't know how to respectfully establish my own boundaries. It was like a burning feeling the whole time, just like everybody was so aware of me."
He continued: "There was a point where I wanted to stop taking jobs that would make me more famous," adding that he had a crisis where he "really didn't know if [he] was going to keep being an actor" due to the "level of heat."
12.
Freddie Prinze Jr. became a heartthrob after starring in I Know What You Did Last Summer, but he's since admitted that it "wasn't the best experience," revealing he was nervous to take on the role because of his lack of experience. In particular, he had a rough time with director Jim Gillespie. "Right away the director did not want me in this movie and made it clear all the time," he claimed, saying he wouldn't give direction or would give notes like "You look dumb when you make that expression."
He also claimed he was almost injured when he was forced to do a dangerous stunt, causing him to be "ready to kill" Gillespie. "It was so scary. And it was my first real experience in the business on a big movie, being the lead of a movie... I was like, 'Yo, if this is how it's going to be, I can't handle this.'" However, costars Ryan Phillippe and Sarah Michelle Gellar helped convince him to just trust his gut and ignore Gillespie.
13.
Later on, Prinze Jr. actually did step away from acting for a bit after appearing on 24 with Kiefer Sutherland. "I did 24, and it was terrible. I hated every moment of it," Prinze said. “Kiefer was the most unprofessional dude in the world. That's not me talking trash. I'd say it to his face. I think everyone that’s worked with him has said that. And I just wanted to quit the business after that. So, I just sort of stopped.”
14.
Chris Evans had terrible anxiety filming Puncture that made him wonder if he should quit the industry. "It was the first time I started having mini panic attacks on set. I really started to think, 'I'm not sure if this [acting] is the right thing for me, I'm not sure if I'm feeling as healthy as I should be feeling.'" In fact, this anxiety almost kept him from taking the role of Captain America/Steve Rogers in the MCU, which he knew would only increase his fame.
15.
Emma Watson nearly quit acting because of her experience on Harry Potter ahead of the fifth film, because the series made it difficult for her to pursue the kind of education she wanted. In fact, she almost quit in 2009, when she started attending Brown University. "I was finding this fame thing was getting to a point of no return. I sensed if this was something I was ever going to step away from it was now or never," Watson told Vanity Fair. Since she'd first become famous as a child, she said the enormity of what she'd signed up for was only just dawning on her. "The Harry Potter phenomenon steps into a different zone," she said of fans. "It crosses into obsession."
"A big part of me coming to terms with it was accepting that this is not your average circumstances," Watson continued. Speaking of her experience on the premieres for the last few films, Watson said, "I'd walk down the red carpet and go into the bathroom. I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I'd put my hands on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Who is this?' I didn't connect with the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling."
16.
Costar Rupert Grint also almost quit acting, though this came after Harry Potter. "We had such an intimate and intense few years in this bubble," he said of the nearly decade-long filming of the eight-film series. "When I started, [acting] was never something that I aspired to do. I did acting with school plays and stuff like that. But it was never something that I actively dreamed of. I mean, I fell in love with it while I was doing it. But I definitely did think, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ I wanted to live a little bit. I felt like I'd missed out on a lot. Being in that adult environment from such an early age, it was nice to just be away from it and not have any kind of commitments at all, and just be a bit free." However, Grint decided to stick with it post-HP, albeit in less high-profile roles.
17.
Asa Butterfield started acting very young, playing a boy who lives near a concentration camp in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas at just 10 years old. He found this traumatizing due to the film's heavy subject matter, despite the fact that he "knew it was only acting." In particular, the gas chamber scene was difficult. "I remember being in a room full of men, some of whom were completely naked, and it was dark, and they shut the door on us, and it was just...awful," Butterfield recalled.
"There were a few times I came out and said, 'I can't do it.' We took gaps between takes, we played games. But it's hard for a kid. That topic," Butterfield continued. After he was done filming, he apparently told his mother he didn't want to act anymore, though he doesn't remember saying so now and says his parents were always supportive of whatever he wanted. He ended up going back to acting a few years later.
18.
Anna Faris considered quitting acting after she left the starring role on her sitcom Mom, mostly because she was enjoying having more free time for the first time in decades of hard work. "I really started to think about where I wanted to go in terms of career," she said, revealing that she'd wondered if she had enough money to retire. However, in the end, Faris decided to be more selective about her projects and time.
19.
Cate Blanchett considered quitting acting after starring in Tár: "I think it was because it was such a physical role, the echoes of it are still with me and I think I'm like a lot of audience members, I need time to process it,'" Blanchett said on The Sunday Project. She laughed, "I don't ever want to work again," and said she hoped to spend some time gardening with her mother in Australia and "to be still and think." She reiterated this sentiment at Cannes: “I’m always trying to get out of acting. I've been trying to stop acting my entire professional life." However, Blanchett is still acting, having most recently appeared in The Wrong Girls.
20.
Lily James was similarly exhausted after playing Pamela Anderson in the limited series Pam & Tommy, especially considering the amount of time she had to spend preparing to play the real-life star, both before filming and in the makeup trailer. "I was dead by the end. I was on my knees and I-never-wanna-work-again tired," she told the Hollywood Reporter. "But luckily, that didn’t last too long. So it was all part of the experience, and I was grateful for that time."
21.
Shailene Woodley considered quitting acting after starring in the Divergent series — in particular, after filming The Divergent Saga: Allegiant. "The last one was a bit of a hard experience for everyone, and that was really what made me think I need to have some human experiences outside of this industry," Woodley revealed, saying she "hit a wall with acting" and "felt it was time to do something different."
Woodley told her agent not to send her any more scripts, but her agent was relentless when it came to Big Little Lies. The project ultimately made Woodley "fall in love with acting again."
22.
Kit Harington has discussed how, as Game of Thrones went on, starring in the wildly popular series took a toll on him. “I went through some mental health difficulties after Thrones, and during the end of Thrones,” he revealed after he finished a stint in a wellness rehabilitation center post-GoT. "I think it was directly due to the nature of the show and what I had been doing for years." He ultimately decided to take a break from acting to "really concentrate on [him]self."
He later admitted that he spent much of the COVID lockdown "getting over this TV show, where by the end of it I didn't know if I wanted to be an actor any more." However, Harington said he came "out on the other side" and "realized that I actually miss my craft, I miss what I do. It's a nice revelation."
23.
Rooney Mara had a terrible experience making A Nightmare on Elm Street, which caused her to almost quit the industry: "I didn’t want to act anymore," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I was like, 'This isn't what I signed up for.' If this is what my opportunities are going to be like, then I'm not that interested in acting. So I was very discouraged and disheartened."
Luckily, Mara was "reinspired" by the script for The Social Network, and she didn't quit Hollywood, though her perspective had changed. "I got to this place, that I still live in, that I don't want to act unless I'm doing stuff that I feel like I have to do. So after making [A Nightmare on Elm Street], I decided, 'OK, I'm just not going to act anymore unless it's something that I feel that way about.'"
24.
Jessica Alba had such a bad experience in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — in particular, while filming her character's death scene — that she almost gave up on acting: "The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? … Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'"
"It all got me thinking, 'Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don’t want me to be a real person?'" Alba continued. "And so I just said, 'F--- it. I don't care about this business anymore.'" Alba largely stepped away from acting the year after the film released, after having her first child. "I couldn't go back to what I was doing before and be authentic. I just couldn't. I didn't care about it the same way," she said, noting she wanted to prioritize motherhood and health. She later founded baby product brand The Honest Company.
25.
Penn Badgley almost turned down his starring role in Gossip Girl. This wasn't due to one individual role, per se, but an overall sense of fatigue after working since age 12. "By the time I was 20, I was feeling real disillusioned and dried up and tired of being in Hollywood and acting. When you're 20 years old and you've been doing something professionally since you were 12, that's your life," he recalled, remembering how he was helping support his parents. "I had a tiredness about me at 20 that I think is not typical for a 20-year-old because I've been working for so long."
At 20, his career was gaining traction, having just starred in John Tucker Must Die and the miniseries The Bedford Diaries. Still, Badgley was thinking about quitting acting and becoming a musician instead. However, he was "close to broke," and, without the ability to move back in with his parents, he said, "the stakes were high." Thus, he ultimately decided to take the Gossip Girl role, which skyrocketed him to fame.
26.
Maika Monroe, similarly, almost quit after a string of projects burned her out and caused her to feel disillusioned with the industry. "I did about seven films back to back, and they weren't all great experiences. Some good, some bad," the actor, who broke out with 2014's It Follows, told People. "I was just in a mental state where I was like, 'This isn’t feeling good to me anymore,'" she recalled. "This industry and this job can be really hard on you, mentally, and I just needed to take a step back and then enter in again." Luckily, 2019's Villains ended up causing her to fall in love with acting again, and she's continued with a string of other films in the years since. "Not needing to do everything and being picky has been key," she said.
27.
And finally, we'll end on a few actors who actually did leave the industry after a project. Ian Somerhalder both starred and served as an executive producer on the Netflix series V Wars, but after shooting the first season, he wasn't happy with how it turned out. "Worked really hard on this thing for almost a year, and the show that got turned in wasn't even watchable." It was so bad he didn't even want his name on it, and offered to pay back his salary. He then wrested creative control of the project back, with him and fellow producer James Gibb raising $6 million to do six days of reshoots. The stress and work involved were so bad that Somerhalder had to be admitted to the hospital. Still, the reshoots worked, and the show was popular internationally. However, Netflix canceled it prior to Season 2.
The cancellation caused Somerhalder to reassess his whole career. "I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said to my wife, I was like, 'Man, I'm 40 years old. I don’t want to spend two years of my life doing something, working this hard' — one year fully unpaid — 'for this executive who had issues in high school so they want to exert power now.' I am not here for my career and livelihood to be dictated by someone who has mommy or daddy issues." He also said it was difficult to be away from family on shoots or to bring them with him instead. "I want to focus on family and the future of farming and food and energy and the big things," he said. "I don’t need to chase awards and anything that would make me feel better about myself."
28.
Jennette McCurdy quit acting after playing Sam for eight years on iCarly and Sam & Cat. She later said she was ashamed of the roles she took as a teenager (most likely in relation to Sam, her most prominent role). "[I] felt like it was the most cheesy, embarrassing. I did the shows that I was on from like 13 to 21, and by 15, I was already embarrassed," she said. She has since become a successful author.
McCurdy's negative time on the two shows contributed to this decision; her book I'm Glad My Mom Died describes horrible experiences at the hands of an unnamed figure named The Creator, who many believe to be Dan Schneider. Schneider created a number of popular shows on the network in the '90s, 2000s, and 2010s, including iCarly. There have been many rumors of abuse complaints against Schneider, and he parted ways with the network in 2018, though the official story is that it was a natural time to end their partnership.
29.
Daniel Day-Lewis also quit acting after his experience making Phantom Thread. "Before making the film, I didn't know I was going to stop acting. I do know that Paul and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing because we were both overwhelmed by a sense of sadness," Day-Lewis told W magazine. "That took us by surprise: We didn’t realize what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with. And still is."
The "sadness came to stay ... during the telling of the story," Day-Lewis revealed. "There's something of the responsibility of the artist that hung over me. I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing. The work can seem vital. Irresistible, even. And if an audience believes it, that should be good enough for me. But, lately, it isn't." However, Day-Lewis returned to the industry last year, starring in Anemone, his son Ronan's film, which the two co-wrote together.
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