Some actors are simply upstaged by the next big thing, but there are also those stars
whose careers end because they did something absolutely horrible or experienced bad things
or just can't put butts in cineplex seats anymore.
Here are some stars Hollywood seemingly stopped casting in 2018.
Arrested Career Development
Jeffrey Tambor was among television's most respected and versatile actors.
An industry veteran of groundbreaking television, Tambor earned four Emmy nominations for his
work as self-absorbed talk show sidekick Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, then moved
on to portray a comically terrible father and fallen construction tycoon wanted for
a little "light treason" on Arrested Development.
He then took on the role of a lifetime: Maura Pfefferman, an individual transitioning from
male to female on Amazon's Transparent.
His impressive work on the series makes his alleged behavior on the set all the more shocking
and disappointing.
In February 2018, Amazon fired Tambor from Transparent after Trace Lysette accused the
actor of multiple acts of sexual harassment.
The actor denied any wrongdoing, but because of these allegations as well as revelations
that he verbally harassed Arrested Development costar Jessica Walter, few in Hollywood are
willing to work with Tambor right now.
Don't sleep and tweet
The comeback and fall of Roseanne Barr happened so fast that the world of TV is still nursing
its collective whiplash.
The new Roseanne finished the 2017-18 season as the third-most-watched show on TV, but
then Barr had to screw it all up.
On May 29, 2018, Barr tweeted a racist joke about Valerie Jarett, an advisor to President
Barack Obama.
Barr apologized, saying it was just a tasteless joke, but then she blamed her actions on being
under the influence of the sleeping pill Ambien.
Later on, Barr posted a YouTube video claiming she didn't even know Jarrett was African-American.
Ignoring Barr's defenses, ABC canceled Roseanne.
The network reworked the show into The Conners, in which Barr's character, just like her career,
has died.
Lea the Diva
Lea Michele is supposedly a bit of a diva, and it isn't something she's very shy about.
In 2011, Michele told Allure,
"I came from the theater world, where the word 'diva' was awesome."
But as awesome of a performer as she may be, the former Rachel Berry didn't make a lot
of friends during her time singing Journey songs with other actors pretending to be teens
on Glee.
In Naya Rivera's 2016 memoir Sorry Not Sorry, the actress who played Santana Lopez detailed
the slow dissolution of her friendship with Michele.
Rivera claims their relationship crumbled when she cut into Michele's stardom with more
time on screen.
She also said she took the brunt of Michele's blame for anything at all that went wrong
on set.
Michele's diva attitude might not have been fatal if her first big post-Glee TV show hadn't
been such a spectacular bomb.
In January 2018, ABC canceled her sitcom The Mayor after just nine episodes, putting the
kibosh on a 2018 comeback.
Biggs mistakes
Affable comic actor Jason Biggs has had a few hit movies over the past two decades,
but they're almost all entries in the American Pie franchise, which sees his character mature
from a pie-loving teen to college student to family man.
Producers aren't too keen to bank on the star of flops such as Loser, My Best Friend's Girl,
and Saving Silverman.
Nor are they going to cast him in shows when his big TV starring vehicle, Mad Love, was
canceled after 13 episodes.
Another possible reason for Biggs' not landing more roles: He's mean.
He has a history of trashing American Pie costar Tara Reid on talk shows like In Bed
with Joan and Watch What Happens Live.
He's also one of a growing number of celebrities who should just stay away from Twitter.
While Biggs was voicing Leonardo on Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the network
came under fire for linking to the actor's personal twitter account after Biggs tweeted
off-color remarks about Ann Romney and Janna Ryan during the 2012 Republican National Convention.
Honestly, the last time Biggs made headlines for his work rather than his bad behavior
was when he was let go from the cast of Orange is the New Black in 2015.
Mulder no more
As the quirky and brooding Fox Mulder on The X-Files, David Duchovny unraveled conspiracies
and solved strange mysteries from 1993 on.
He left the show for a while in 1999 to launch a movie career.
Alas, Duchovny's transition to film never really took off.
He returned to X-Files toward its 2002 endgame, and then starred for seven years on the sexy
Showtime series Californication.
His next TV project was the NBC drama Aquarius, which was set in California during the era
of Charles Manson's campaign of terror.
Aquarius tanked, but fortunately for Duchovny, the reboot craze hit.
The revival of The X-Files finished the 2015-16 season as the No. 7 show on broadcast TV.
This time around, the novelty had apparently worn off, tough, because the show dropped
all the way down to No. 91 in the ratings.
To date, Duchovny doesn't have any projects on the horizon, and it doesn't even look like
the X-Files can keep him on screens anymore.
Still, Duchovny has made comebacks before.
Is it possible he has another one up his sleeve?
"How the hell should I know?"
Team Jacob loses
Unfortunately Hollywood has a tendency to chew up child actors and teen idols, and spit
them back out before moving on to the next hot thing.
Poor Taylor Lautner was both child actor and teen idol, starring in The Adventures of Sharkboy
and Lavagirl 3-D and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 while just a lad, and then portraying teen
dream werewolf Jacob Black in all five Twilight movies.
Lautner had trouble transitioning to both adult roles and non-teen supernatural romance
horror movies.
His first starring role came in the drama Abduction, which flopped hard and few people
saw his follow-up films.
Lautner starred on 20 episodes of the British TV comedy Cuckoo, taking over after Andy Samberg
left the show.
Unfortunately, since then it looks like Lautner's star has faded.
He doesn't have anything in the works for 2019 to date, but it was a fun ride, at least.
Hey, he got to host SNL and date Taylor Swift!
American Ugly
After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, one of the first actors whose careers ended
overnight was Kevin Spacey.
A total of 15 people spoke up about Spacey's past assaults and unwanted actions, most prominently
Star Trek: Discovery star Anthony Rapp, who says Spacey made advances toward him when
he was 14 years old.
Spacey issued a bizarre statement in which he apologized for his actions, although he
said he didn't "remember the encounter" and appeared to shift the narrative by coming
out as a gay man.
Not only did Spacey fail to secure future work, but his past and present work came to
an end as well.
Netflix announced plans to do one more season of House of Cards without him, leaving the
show in the very capable hands of actress Robin Wright instead.
Director Ridley Scott took the unprecedented step of eliminating Spacey from All the Money
in the World after the actor had already filmed his scenes, replacing him with Christopher
Plummer only weeks before the film's release.
Plummer got a best supporting actor nomination at the Academy Awards, while Spacey has virtually
disappeared off the face of the earth.
"And like THAT, he's gone."
Not-so-new girl
By the end of its seven-season run in 2018, Fox's New Girl was no longer the widely watched
or much-discussed show it had been during its first few seasons.
But it did transform its talented cast into TV and movie stars.
For example, Damon Wayans Junior and Max Greenfield moved on to CBS's Happy Together and The Neighborhood,
respectively.
Lamorne Morris co-starred in the hit Game Night and has a bunch of projects in the works.
Only Zooey Deschanel, the show's biggest star when it began, doesn't have much going on
right now.
Perhaps she's just taking a break after headlining a sitcom for seven years, or maybe she wants
to spend more time with her two kids, both of whom she was pregnant with while New Girl
was in production.
Let's hope we'll hear more from her down the road.
Rocking the boat
Grey's Anatomy hit the air in 2005 and became an instant smash, making a household name
out of Katherine Heigl, who played Dr. Izzie Stevens.
Scarcely three years later, Heigl started to blow up her career with tactical and pathological
precision.
In a 2008 Vanity Fair interview, she trashed her breakout film, Knocked Up, calling it
"... a little sexist..."
Around the same time, she announced that she had declined the opportunity to submit her
name to the Emmy Awards for her work on Grey's Anatomy.
Heigl told the Los Angeles Times,
"I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination,"
By 2010, she was off the show and scraping together a movie career consisting of minor
to moderate successes such as Killers, Life as We Know It, and the aptly titled One for
the Money.
Heigl returned to TV with a couple of short-lived shows that never went very far.
By 2018, a prickly reputation and a bunch of bombs meant Heigl's only acting work was
a gig on Suits, which is most famous for being the TV series Meghan Markle isn't on anymore.
Spider-Man no more
Maybe actors who play Spider-Man are like Highlanders: there can be only one.
That would explain how Tobey Maguire vaporized from Hollywood the way Tom Holland's iteration
of Spider-Man did at the end of Avengers: Infinity War.
"Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good."
It seemed like Maguire was in it for the long haul in the late '90s and early 2000s with
roles in movies such as The Cider House Rules, Seabiscuit, The Ice Storm, Pleasantville,
and, of course, the first three Spider-Man movies.
And in 2009, he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his excellent work in Brothers as a PTSD-afflicted
soldier coming home after fighting in Afghanistan.
He starred in a few box-office stinkers after that but the final nail in his coffin may
have been his highly unflattering portrayal in Molly Bloom's 2014 memoir Molly's Game.
While several stars merit a mention, Maguire is depicted as a big-time jerk, financially
exploiting other players and making Bloom bark for tips.
The release of Aaron Sorkin's film adaptation of the book made matters worse.
In fact, Maguire's last credited screen role was narrating The Boss Baby in 2017.
Hoffman is done
Dustin Hoffman turned 81 in 2018 and that's probably part of the reason why his long Oscar-winning
career came to a halt recently, a Hoffman movie hasn't been released since 2017, but
there's more to this story.
In December 2017, multiple women came forward to accuse Hoffman of some horrible stuff.
One woman says the actor exposed himself to her in a hotel room when she was a teenager.
Another claims he assaulted her during an audio recording session for Ishtar, and another
says Hoffman forced himself on her in the back of a car.
Yet another accused Hoffman of groping her when they both starred in Death of a Salesman
on Broadway.
Considering how unforgiving Hollywood has been lately to actors accused of abusing women,
things don't look great for Hoffman's career.
No hugging it out
Jeremy Piven was a hard-working character actor for years before he found the role that
brought him lasting fame and three Emmy Awards as Ari Gold, sleazy agent to dude-bro actor
Vincent Chase on the era-defining 2000s comedy Entourage.
After Entourage wrapped in 2011, Piven moved on to slightly more grown-up fare, such as
the the PBS series Mr. Selfridge, and in 2017, the CBS crime procedural Wisdom of the Crowd.
Alas, it would seem the gross behavior so often embodied on Entourage was the kind of
thing that Piven engaged in off-screen, too.
Playboy model and The Real Housewives of Toronto star Ariane Bellamar accused Piven of repeatedly
groping her in his trailer on the set of Entourage.
Piven denied all allegations, but less than a month later, CBS canceled Wisdom of the
Crowd.
Piven's pickings have become very slim.
His only future appearances are in the movie All-Star Weekend, which wrapped up filming
before the scandal broke, and Ghost Killers, which is currently filming.