These 21 Actors Said They Regret Roles They've Played

"The more I read the script, the more I hated the guy." —Robert Pattinson on Edward Cullen

There are some actors who love the characters they play so much that it becomes hard to separate the two.

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Like, is this Robert Downey Jr. or Tony Stark? Scientists can't tell.

However, for some actors, there's no love lost when they finally get to move on from a role, no matter how career-defining it may have been.

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Here are 21 actors who have spoken out about their complicated feelings toward their previous roles.

1. Shailene Woodley said that she felt “stuck” playing Amy Juergens on The Secret Life of the American Teenager and it was one of the hardest things she had to do.

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She told Bustle that she and a lot of her castmates disagreed with much of what was written into the show as it progressed. She said, "There were belief systems that were pushed that were different than my own. Yet legally, I was stuck there. To this day, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do."

2. John Boyega said that Disney didn't know what to do with his character, Finn, and others played by people of color in Star Wars.

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"What I would say to Disney is, do not bring out a Black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are, and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up," he said in a GQ interview. "What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience...’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience."

3. Megan Fox was fired from her role as Mikaela Banes in theTransformers franchise after publicly calling director Michael Bay "a nightmare to work for."

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"He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous madman reputation," she told Wonderland. "'Be hot.' I’ve had that note on set before. 'Mike,' I’ll say, 'Who am I talking to? Where am I supposed to be looking at?' And he responds, 'Just be sexy.' I get mad when people talk to me like that."

4. Jennette McCurdy said she feels “ashamed” of having played Sam Puckett on iCarly.

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On her podcast Empty Inside, she revealed that she felt "ashamed" of many of her previous roles, saying, "I feel so unfulfilled by the roles that I played and 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.”

5. Halle Berry thought the story in Catwoman "didn't feel quite right" because her character's goal was to stop an evil cosmetics mogul instead of saving the world like male superheroes do.

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She told Variety, "I remember having that argument: ‘Why can’t Catwoman save the world like Batman and Superman do? Why is she just saving women from a face cream that cracks their face off?’ But I was just the actor for hire. I wasn’t the director. I had very little say over that.”

6. Blake Lively said that playing Serena van der Woodsen on Gossip Girl felt “personally compromising."

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She told Allure, "People loved it, but it always felt a little personally compromising — you want to be putting a better message out there."

7. Early in his career, Zac Efron regretted playing Troy Bolton in High School Musical because of the way it caused him to be typecast in other movies.

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He told Men's Journal that being a Disney star wasn't the life he imagined for himself. He said, "I was like 17. And I said, ‘Guys, you know this is not at all what I want to do?’ And they were like, ‘Really?’”

8. Harrison Ford spent years asking for Han Solo to be killed off in Star Wars.

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He told USA Today, "I wanted him to die for a long time. So I finally talked [the filmmakers] into it."

In a fan Q&A following Han's death in The Force Awakens, he said, "I think it’s a fitting use of the character. I’ve been arguing for Han Solo to die for about 30 years, not because I was tired of him or because he’s boring, but his sacrifice for the other characters would lend gravitas and emotional weight."

He also told Conan O'Brien, "I thought that the best utility for the character would be to sacrifice himself to a high ideal."

9. Michelle Pfeiffer said she took on the role of Stephanie in Grease 2 because she was "young and didn't know any better."

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She once revealed that she couldn't believe how bad it was and said that she "hated that film with a vengeance."

10. Evangeline Lilly would throw Lost scripts across the room in frustration at the amount of autonomy Kate Austen lost as the series went on.

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On an episode of the podcast The Lost Boys, she said, "I felt that my character went from being autonomous — really having her own story, and her own journey, and her own agendas — to chasing two men around the island, and that irritated the shit out of me."

11. Viola Davis wished the voices of her character Aibileen Clark and the other maids had been more centralized in The Help.

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"I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom," she told the New York Times. "And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie."

12. Channing Tatum said that Paramount "pushed" him into playing Duke in G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra because of a three-picture deal.

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He said that he wasn't given an option to pass on the film. In an interview with Howard Stern, he said the studio told him, "You’re doing this or we’re going to sue you."

13. Robert Pattinson said that he would "mindlessly hate" Twilight if he hadn't actually starred in the franchise as Edward Cullen.

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He also told Empire, "The more I read the script, the more I hated this guy."

14. Jamie Dornan felt "quite uncomfortable" playing Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey.

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He told Entertainment Weekly, "I felt like it was very far away from me, and sometimes I struggled with it."

15. Christopher Plummer found playing Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music boring.

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He told the Boston Globe that he was "a bit bored" with the captain in 2010. However, his dislike of the character wasn't a new thing; a 1966 New York Times article revealed that he called the film "The Sound of Mucus."

16. Andrew Lincoln was concerned about his character Mark in Love Actually being a stalker.

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He told the Wrap that he asked director Richard Curtis, "Do you not think we’re sort of borderline stalker territory here?"

Curtis replied, "No, no. Not with you playing it, darling. You’ll be alright.”

17. Katherine Heigl called the portrayal of her character Alison in Knocked Up "a little sexist."

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"It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it on some days," she told Vanity Fair. "I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women?"

18. Christian Bale tried to get out of the singing and dancing that playing Jack Kelly in Newsies required.

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He never wanted to do a musical in the first place. In a 1997 interview with Movieline, he said, "When I first read the script, I thought it wasn't a musical. Later, after I realized it was, I asked [the director] if maybe I could duck over here into the pub while the numbers were going on, and then come out when it was over."

19. Angus T. Jones came to regret playing Jake Harper on Two and a Half Men because the show's content conflicted with his religious faith.

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In a November 2012 video for an Alabama-based church, he said, "I’m on Two and a Half Men, and I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth."

Soon after, however, he issued an apology, saying, "I apologize if my remarks reflect me showing indifference to and disrespect of my colleagues and a lack of appreciation of the extraordinary opportunity of which I have been blessed. I never intended that."

Two years later, he said, "I was a paid hypocrite because I wasn’t okay with it, but I was still doing it.”

20. Sean Connery was fed up with playing James Bond after seven James Bond films.

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According to the Guardian, he said, "I have always hated that damned James Bond."

His friend Michael Caine also told the Wall Street Journal, "He’d be walking down the street and people would say, ‘Look, there’s James Bond.’ That was particularly upsetting to him.”

21. And Jessica Alba almost quit acting when the Fantastic Four director told her she needed to "cry pretty" as Invisible Woman.

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"The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like, 'Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.' And I'm like, but there's no connection to a human being," she said. "And then it 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 person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work?"