Bad Actors NOT acting badly

SaintGiff
SaintGiff Posts: 3,679 Member
in Chit-Chat
There have been a few movie threads of late so hey, what's one more. I had this conversation recently with someone so I thought I would extend it here. What are your best examples of actors who are pretty much universally accepted to be pretty terrible but who managed to grind out one really good performance? I had three off the top of my head.

Ryan Phillippe - Stop Loss: I think playing a soldier maybe restrained him enough that he was actually pretty good.

John Travolta - Love Song for Bobby Long: The only time he's not just played John Travolta.

Robert Pattinson - The Rover: Giving him a character with tics and twitches actually gave him something to do with his face other than that godforsaken blank half-sneer.

Replies

  • thedaydreamer92
    thedaydreamer92 Posts: 198 Member
    Owen Wilson- Marley and Me
  • thedaydreamer92
    thedaydreamer92 Posts: 198 Member
    Ben Affleck- Good Will Hunting
  • TheBeerRunner
    TheBeerRunner Posts: 2,777 Member
    Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight


    Ok, maybe he wasn't a bad actor, but he wasn't really my cup of tea.
  • SaintGiff
    SaintGiff Posts: 3,679 Member
    thedaydreamer92 wrote: »
    Owen Wilson- Marley and Me

    I've never seen Marley and Me, but I'm skeptical
  • phil4v7
    phil4v7 Posts: 68 Member
    I almost said Hayden Christensen, but then realized I couldn't think of an actual good one. The next one that came to mind was Kevin James who usually just annoys me but did surprisingly well in Hitch.
  • JolieSvelte
    JolieSvelte Posts: 21 Member
    Shailene Woodley.

    How she began getting jobs in Hollywood is beyond my comprehension, but she lived up to her name by giving the most milquetoast, totally devoid of personality, wooden performance I have seen by a young actress in the Divergent series. Which, by the way, was the first time I saw one of my favorite actresses, Kate Winslet, take a paycheck movie. I was devastated.

    As for Woodley's halfway decent performance, she didn't utterly suck in the tv series Big Little Lies.

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