Great actors are good at making people cry.
Sometimes, however, it’s not just audiences who are reduced to tears by an actor’s performance
it’s also the folks working on the film with them.
For better or worse, these are the actors who made people cry on set.
The Gibson effect
When Gaby Hoffman was asked by HuffPost Live to look back on her experiences as a child
actor working with difficult male directors, she pointed a finger at Mel Gibson on his
directorial debut The Man Without a Face.
“He screamed at me Mel Gibson screamed at you?
He really screamed at me - I as acting like a kid instead of a professional actor.
It happens once in a while, when you're a kid actor.
Did he make you cry?"
"Yeah.
oh yeah."
The experience may not have been especially pleasant for Hoffman, but it certainly didn't
hold Gibson back.
The next film he both directed and starred in was a little flick called Braveheart, which
went on to win five Academy Awards.
Scarred
Taking on a role as iconic as Pennywise in It might be the only instance in which you
could call it a success if you made children cry.
In a chat with Interview, actor Bill Skarsgard spoke about the difficult situation he found
himself in on the set of the 2017 remake, saying,
"At one point, they set up this entire scene, and these kids come in, and none of them have
seen me yet.
Some of them were really intrigued, but some couldn't look at me, and some were shaking.
This one kid started crying.
He started to cry and the director yelled, 'Action!'"
Those kids weren't the only ones traumatized.
Skarsgard scarred himself, too.
He admitted to thinking:
"What am I doing?
What is this?
This is horrible."
A grand narrative
During filming on HBO’s Westworld, it was simply being given the opportunity to co-star
alongside acting legend Anthony Hopkins in Westworld that made Evan Rachel Wood emotional.
“So I hope you will enjoy this last piece… very much.”
Wood told Made Man,
"The first time I got to work with Anthony, actually every time, I would be done and would
have to go to a corner to compose myself.”
She recalled a time when a friend visited her on set and found her bawling her eyes
out as her pal tried to comfort her, Wood had to explain that this was just a regular
occurrence after shooting a scene with Hopkins, saying,
"He's just not like anything or anyone I've seen.
He's connected to something I can't comprehend.
And, he's just so good in this role."
Heartbreak in the theater
Michael Keaton’s nomination for an Academy Award is testament enough to the strength
of his performance in Birdman, but if anyone knew it beforehand, it would have been co-star
Amy Ryan.
Regarding their emotional dressing room scene together, Ryan told Vanity Fair:
"I would just cry because Michael was so in the groove.
He was in such a true intimate place and it would break my heart watching him go through
that scene."
“I should have just been there for the two of you.
You know?
Just the three of us.”
Birdman featured very long takes with few hard cuts, so as Keaton transitioned seamlessly
from one scene to another, Ryan said she'd jump out of the shot and attempt to regain
her composure.
And if you thought that time might have softened the impact of Keaton’s performance for her
think again.
She said:
"I cried in the theater, too.”
Breakfast at Nicole’s
For Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies, watching Nicole Kidman take on the role
inspired by the her own real life experiences was a tremendous privilege, but it was seeing
Kidman dressed as Audrey Hepburn during one scene which really pushed her over the edge.
Moriarty told TheFIX:
"They had her dressed exactly as I described her in the books.
So I was surprised that I got a bit teary when I saw her.
She looked like something from a fairy tale.
She looked gorgeous."
Dodge this
Adam Sandler has taken a lot of heat from critics over the years for his offbeat brand
of comedy, but most of the flack for his role in Billy Madison came from the parents of
the kids he worked with.
During an interview on Conan, Sandler recalled shooting a dodgeball scene he was featured
in.
“I hit some kid pretty hard, and he gets upset and he stars crying.
And the parents all come up to me and like 'hey what's the deal?' and whatta ya mean?
what happened?”
Not really seeing what the problem was, Sandler said he tried to deflate the situation by
explaining that it was all planned.
“And I was like what are you talking about didn't they read the script?
They're six.
They don’t read yet.”