Benedict Cumberbatch: Zoolander 2
When it comes to what movies can get away with, tastes change fast. Just ask Benedict Cumberbatch, who decided to play for laughs a non-binary character named All in Ben Stiller’s 2016 film Zoolander 2. That said, the role was controversial at the time – there was an online petition urging a boycott. But it has only looked more tone-deaf over time.
In 2022, Cumberbatch offered an almost-apology, telling Variety: “In this era, my role would never be performed by anybody other than a trans actor. But I remember at the time not thinking of it necessarily in that regard, and it being more about two dinosaurs, two heteronormative cliches not understanding this new diverse world. But it backfired a little bit.”
Apparently, the role still plays on his mind, since this week he offered a further lament to Variety. “I’ve had to apologise for that quite a lot. It’s a difficult one to talk about,” he said. “I love that group of people and it was the chance to be part of something that the first time around was iconic … But it got complicated and it got misunderstood and I upset people. I respect that, so I probably wouldn’t do that again now.”
Emma Stone: Aloha
Her career has flourished in the past decade, but in 2015 Emma Stone was staring down the barrel of a career-ender. The culprit was her role in Cameron Crowe’s Hawaii-set Aloha. In Aloha, Stone – a woman from Arizona with Swedish, German, English, Scottish and Irish ancestry – was cast as the air force pilot Allison Ng, a woman described as being of one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Hawaiian descent.
Even before the film was released, activist groups were calling out the film’s whitewashing of Asian culture, which prompted Stone to say that she had “learned on a macro level about the insane history of whitewashing in Hollywood and how prevalent the problem truly is. It’s ignited a conversation that’s very important … There’s a lot of conversation about how we want to see people represented on screen and what we need to change as a business to reflect culture in a clearer way and not in an idealised way.” When Sandra Oh made a crack about the film at the 2019 Golden Globes, noting that Crazy Rich Asians was “the first studio film with an Asian-American lead since … Aloha,” Stone yelled: “I’m sorry!” from the audience.
Tim Roth: United Passions
It’s hard to think of a film quite as ill-conceived as 2014’s United Passions, a Fifa vanity project released shortly before Fifa was engulfed in a jaw-dropping corruption scandal. The film was a flop, failing to make back even $200,000 of its $32m budget.
The man who played the now disgraced Fifa president Sepp Blatter had no qualms about apologising for his part in it. Talking to the German newspaper Die Welt in 2015, he said: “I apologise I didn’t question the director, I didn’t question the script. This is a role that will have my father turning in his grave.” He expanded in a Reddit interview: “I hated doing it, it was the wrong film, but for the right reasons. I had two kids in college so I had to make a decision and it was probably poorly judged, but once you make that decision you have to follow through. It’s a hard road, being in something you don’t want to do, but I’m glad I did it for my family.” In other words, as he told Yahoo Movies, United Passions was “a crap movie that I did for money”.
Mahershala Ali: Green Book
Almost everyone involved in 2018’s Green Book has apologised for something or other – its writer for tweeting that Muslims in Jersey City were cheering when the “towers went down” on 9/11; its director for flashing his penis at colleagues during meetings in the 90s – but none quite as hard as Mahershala Ali, who played the real life concert pianist Don Shirley.
Despite Ali winning an Oscar for the role, some viewers complained that Shirley’s agency had been removed to accommodate a “white saviour” narrative. None were more outraged than Shirley’s brother, who called the film “a symphony of lies”. Amid this, Ali rang Shirley’s family. “I got a call from Mahershala Ali, a very, very respectful phone call, from him personally. He called me and my Uncle Maurice in which he apologised profusely if there had been any offence,” said Shirley’s nephew, Edwin Shirley. “What he said was: ‘If I have offended you, I am so, so terribly sorry. I did the best I could with the material I had. I was not aware that there were close relatives with whom I could have consulted to add some nuance to the character.’”
Paul Newman: The Silver Chalice
Paul Newman’s screen career seemed to get off to a flying start in 1954, when his first feature performance, in Victor Saville’s The Silver Chalice, resulted in a Golden Globe nomination. Despite this, the film has not been well remembered, holding a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its lumbering script and inauthentic sets. However, it was Newman – who played the artist who made the chalice that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper – who had the worst to say of it.
Calling the film “the worst movie produced during the 1950s”, Newman actively tried to scupper its legacy. When it played every night for a week on a Los Angeles TV station in the early 60s, Newman took out adverts in trade papers reading: “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week – Channel 9.” This only drew everyone’s attention to the film, which received unusually high ratings.
Mark Wahlberg: The Happening
Mark Wahlberg doesn’t readily gives himself over to apologies, probably because he is too busy getting up at 2.30am to exercise. But sometimes – just sometimes – he crosses the line so egregiously that it would be wrong if he didn’t acknowledge it. We are talking, of course, about his role in M Night Shyamalan’s 2008 film The Happening.
A bad movie in the classic sense, in that you can’t tell whether the cast and crew are doing it on purpose or not, The Happening is a film about telepathic trees who drive humans to suicide. It is so stupid that it briefly made Wahlberg a laughing stock. Eventually, the din became so loud that Wahlberg felt forced to give the closest thing to an apology he has ever given. Behold: “It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.” One for the all-time apology archives, you’ll agree.
