1.
Hugh Grant recently called playing an Oompa Loompa in the upcoming Wonka “very uncomfortable,” as he had to work with a lot of different cameras and apparatuses to appear in miniature “I made a big fuss about it,” he said. “I couldn’t have hated the whole thing more.” He said he wasn’t sure what to do with his body, and “never received a satisfactory answer” about whether or not he should “act with [his] body.” He continued, “Frankly, what I did with my body was terrible, and it’s all been replaced with an animator,” saying all the dancing was created through animation.
2.
Ian McKellen called his filming experience playing Gandalf in The Hobbit films “miserable,” as he was frustrated that he had to film using green screens on a soundstage rather than shoot on location, as he had for Lord of the Rings. “It may be my impression, but I don’t remember a green screen on The Lord of the Rings. If Gandalf was on top of a mountain, I’d be there on the mountain.”
For The Hobbit, he also didn’t even shoot some of the scenes with actual actors. “In order to shoot the dwarves and a large Gandalf, we couldn’t be in the same set. All I had for company was 13 photographs of the dwarves on top of stands with little lights — whoever’s talking flashes up,” McKellan said. “Pretending you’re with 13 other people when you’re on your own, it stretches your technical ability to the absolute limits.” He revealed, “I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, ‘This is not why I became an actor’. Unfortunately, the microphone was on and the whole studio heard.”
3.
Martin Freeman similarly disliked that he would film scenes with McKellan while on different soundstages using Jackson’s “slave motion control” technology. “When Bilbo and Gandalf had scenes together, Ian and I would get together, run our lines, rehearse, it would feel great. He was just gorgeous to work with. Genuinely brilliant,” he said. “Then we’d be separated, I wouldn’t be able to look at him, I’d have to look at a scale double, while he’s doing lines off camera. That was frustrating because I dearly wanted to do scenes with him.”
4.
Even when the Lord of the Rings movies were being filmed, advances in film technology and CGI meant that less of the set was “real” as the series progressed, which bothered Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn. “Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back,” Mortensen told The Telegraph. “In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects.”
“It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third,” Mortensen continued. “Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.” Unlike McKellan, Mortensen did not appear in The Hobbit films.
5.
Ewan McGregor similarly struggled a bit with the new technology that was coming out in the early 2000s, while he was filming the Star Wars prequels. “There was so much green screen and blue screen because George was pushing into this new realm that he had designed, that he was responsible for. He wanted to max out that technology, but that meant for us that we were very much on blue screens and green screens, and it was hard work,” he said.
However, he said he was still passionate about the work, and suggested that the larger struggle was that the films were not well-received at the time: “To do that and be passionate about it, and then for the films to be not very well received was really tough. So it’s really lovely to have that new relationship with them now.”
6.
Adam Driver also spoke about green-screen acting for the Star Wars films. “You’re standing in front of the screen, and they’re like, ‘Trust us, your lightsaber’s working,’” he told Seth Meyers. “Or, ‘There’s space behind you, it looks really cool.’ … You don’t feel like you’re commanding anybody other than sticks and pingpong balls.”
7.
Idris Elba struggled while filming Thor: The Dark World, mostly due to the fact he’d just come from filming Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. While he didn’t specifically say he disliked working with a green screen, he described his thoughts while filming a scene in a harness with a green screen behind him: “In between takes, I was stuck there, fake hair stuck onto my head with glue … while they reset. And I’m thinking, Twenty-four hours ago, I was Mandela.”
He continued: “When I walked into the set, the extras called me Madiba [Mandela’s clan name]. I was literally walking in this man’s boots. Then there I was, in this stupid harness, with this wig and this sword and these contact lenses. It ripped my heart out.”
8.
Anthony Hopkins was also not a huge fan of the green screens used in the Thor films. He said he’d labeled the script “no acting required,” then later told The New Yorker, “They put me in armor; they shoved a beard on me. Sit on the throne; shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.”
9.
And Christian Bale was excited to join the MCU as Gorr in Thor: Love & Thunder, but his experience on set was less than ideal. It was his first time acting with so many green screens, and he wasn’t fond of the experience. “I mean, the definition of it is monotony,” he said. “Can you differentiate one day from the next? No. Absolutely not. You have no idea what to do. I couldn’t even differentiate one stage from the next.”
10.
Kit Harington hated working with the CGI dragons on the set of Game of Thrones. “Emilia had been moaning about it for seasons, and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. You have not been through the mud in Northern Ireland. A buck in a nice warm room?’” But he realized he’d been wrong when he worked with the rig. “She was absolutely right. It was horrific. It’s not acting at all. It is not acting, it never will be acting, and it is not what I’d signed up for. It is very uncomfortable as a man.”
11.
In order to shoot the quidditch scenes in the Harry Potter films, the actors had to be put on blue moving pedestals against a blue screen, leaning left and right as cameras moved and created the illusion of fast movement. Daniel Radcliffe was not a fan: “Quidditch is right up there with the least fun things I’ve done on ‘Harry Potter’ certainly. It is not a pleasant experience, it does hurt quite a lot and it is not something I would be rushing back to do!” he said, with Tom Felton agreeing and adding, “I’m so glad I haven’t done it since the second film.”
12.
Johnny Depp called working with green screens in the Alice in Wonderland films “exhausting,” adding that “The novelty of the green wears off very quickly.” He continued, “I mean, I like an obstacle – I don’t mind having to spew dialogue while having to step over a dolly track while some guy is holding a card and I’m talking to a piece of tape. But the green beats you up. You’re kind of befuddled at the end of the day.”
14.
Michael Shannon similarly hated his motion capture suit in Man of Steel, calling it “the most humiliating garments that exists in the known universe.” He also said, “It’s very tight. It has a variety of different colors and shapes on it and it makes you feel like you’re the court jester. And it’s funny because when I met with Zack we were talking about it before it started and he mentioned that there was going to be a lot of CGI, or whatever. I said, ‘Just don’t make me wear one of those silly suits.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, don’t worry, I know exactly what you’re talking about.’ I was like, ‘It’s going to be really hard for me to be intimidating if I have to wear one of those silly suits.’ He said, ‘I totally understand.’”
However, Shannon continued, “Then I showed up and he’s like, ‘Dude, I swear to God, it’s going to be so bad ass when we’re done. Trust me, it’s going to be wicked.’ And, you know, people understand and you get used to it. The first day, you feel like you’re getting rushed by a fraternity… and then it wears off the next day. Because I’m not the only one wearing one — there are other people wearing them, too.”
15.
While Donald Glover didn’t actually talk about disliking the process of digital scanning (when an actor’s expressions, movements, and likeness are scanned should the actor pass away during filming or become unavailable, among other reasons), he didn’t love the practice. After filming Solo, he said, “I’m scanned into Star Wars now, my face and body. Who’s to say that at some point they won’t take that scan and say, ‘Let’s make another movie with Donald. He’s been dead for fifteen years but we can do whatever we want with him.’”
16.
Jessica Chastain also disliked the digital scanning process, though she didn’t name the film she’d been asked to do it for. “They took me into a room. They scanned my face. Then they asked me to smile, to frown,” she said. “I said no. I just didn’t know how they were going to use it.”
17.
And finally, several actors have expressed their dislike for the digital de-aging which has become popular in the last few years. For example, Willem Dafoe thought it was pointless that he was de-aged in Spider-Man: Far From Home. “Yeah, there was a couple of shots that were really fuzzy. I thought it was silly, because the de-aging thing, they don’t have down yet. And what’s the point? I don’t look that much older, I don’t think, anyway. It’s the creams.”
18.
And Mark Hamill didn’t love filming his de-aged scenes in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, which were created using a young lookalike stand-in (Graham Hamilton), past footage/audio of Hamill, AI voice technology, and a modern performance from Hamill. Basically, Hamill would shoot the scene, then Hamilton would try to do it the same way, then tech would combine them and add the tech. Hamill said, “It is unusual to see yourself like that,” and “It can’t be cheap.”
19.
Jeff Bridges disliked the way he looked de-aged in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, saying he “looked like a weird version of Bill Marr.”
20.
Colin Firth agreed, saying his wife didn’t recognize his “young self” in the film. “I don’t think it looked like the real [me]. I mean, there’s plenty of evidence, photographic evidence one can compare but it didn’t remind me of my young self.”
21.
Finally, Mads Mikkelson called it “a little weird” to be de-aged for Indiana Jones, and said he “sense[d] a smell of plastic,” though he said “they did a hell of a job” and called it “amazing [that] they can do it.” He later acknowledged, however, that “It’s obviously not something that any of us will be huge fans of if they don’t need us anymore. This is not what we want.”
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