If acceptance speeches have taught us anything, the number one person most actors want to
please is their mom. But what happens if they're in something a little too risqué or violent?
With that in mind, here are the roles that got actors in trouble with their moms.
Since 2016's Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland has been best known as Spider-Man,
probably the most earnest and innocent superhero in the MCU. But as much as he's enjoyed playing
the iconic web-slinger, he's also attempted to branch out into a broader range of roles.
And the 2021 crime drama Cherry couldn't be more of a contrast,
much to his mom's horror. Holland plays the title character, a veteran of the Iraq War
who self-medicates his PTSD with heroin and ends up robbing banks to fund his drug habit.
During filming, the actor sent his mother a video of an especially grueling scene in which
his character is going through withdrawal on the floor of a prison cell. As he recalled to Esquire,
"Biggest mistake ever [...] She was furious with me."
Holland realized a little too late that what his mom likes
about his movies are the parts that make her go:
"That's my little boy."
Alas, Cherry doesn't have anything like that. Holland considers the film
the hardest role of his career, and the same can be said for his mom. Luckily,
she eventually came around, as his parents were able to enjoy it and be proud of their son.
Most parents would probably struggle to watch their kids playing a character who gets brutally
tortured and killed on screen. But watching them carry out the torturing and killing themselves
can also provoke some strong emotions. Kathy Bates has become a TV legend in recent years
thanks to her American Horror Story performances. But before she was torturing enslaved people in
Coven or terrifying the residents of Outpost 3 in Apocalypse, she played obsessed fan Annie Wilkes
in the Stephen King adaptation Misery. In the movie, Annie traps Paul Sheldon, her favorite
author, in her house and forces him to write a new book the way that she wants it to go.
Even if you've never seen the movie or read the novel it's based on, you probably know
about the most notorious scene in which Annie breaks Paul's ankles with a sledgehammer.
Annie is widely considered one of the greatest movie villains of all time,
and Bates even won an Oscar for her performance.
But her mother wasn't exactly on board. As she revealed on an episode of Conan in 2017,
"She saw it, and she said she didn't know what all the fuss was about,
that she had actually seen that behavior while I was growing up."
"She just thought you were playing yourself!"
“That's exactly right, so… moms! What can I tell ya?"
"Oh, she used to hobble everybody!"
"Yeah."
Better hide your sledgehammers next time Kathy Bates comes to visit!
Many Zac Efron fans were disturbed to hear that he would be playing serial killer Ted
Bundy in the 2019 biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. The role was quite
the departure for the Disney star-turned-comedy lead. And during a screening of the film,
Efron's mom couldn't get her head around it either. As the actor recounted to Page Six,
"I’ve never seen my mom like that before. She was so scared, she was terrified."
Efron's mom's reaction actually made him curious about Bundy, whom he described as:
"The most notorious, evil, scumbag killer of women."
Efron's mom also had opinions about one of his more lighthearted roles.
In the 2016 comedy sequel Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, his character,
coincidentally also named Teddy, distracts a party full of sorority girls with a dance that
ends with him revealing his private parts, although it was actually a prosthetic prop.
A paparazzi picture from the set made its way to Efron's mom, who ended up telling her son,
"Have some class!"
There are two schools of thought regarding Robert Downey Jr.'s performance in the 2008 satire Tropic
Thunder. One says that the blackface the white actor donned to play a white actor who's undergone
cosmetic surgery to darken his skin is a hilarious commentary on the ridiculousness of actors who
change their appearance for a role. The other says that ultimately, Downey was still a white
actor in blackface playing into stereotypes about Black men. Downey's mom was in the second camp.
During a 2020 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the actor admitted,
"My mother was horrified."
As he recalled, she told him,
"I have a bad feeling about this."
"I was like, 'Yeah, me too, Mom.'”
Downey also explained his decision to take the role despite his mother's warning, as he noted,
"I get to hold up to nature the insane self-involved hypocrisy
of artists and what they think they’re allowed to do on occasion."
He also added,
"It was impossible to not have it be an offensive nightmare of a movie,
and 90 percent of my Black friends are like, 'Dude, that was great.'"
Jonah Hill's filmography doesn't exactly scream "family-friendly." Movies like Superbad,
Knocked Up, and Get Him to the Greek definitely aren't exactly safe for watching with your mom.
But in 2011, he proved that he could carry a dramatic role that his parents would have no
trouble watching when he picked up an Oscar nomination for the baseball flick Moneyball.
Then in 2013, he combined his Oscar-worthy dramatic skills with his comedy background for the
crime epic The Wolf of Wall Street, in which he played a financial trader who made Hill's previous
characters look like well-behaved kindergartners. The actor struggled to find anything to like
about the goldfish-eating delinquent, so perhaps it's no surprise that watching it
with his mom wasn't exactly the best idea. As he recounted on Late Night with Seth Meyers,
"[My mom] sat next to me at the Wolf of Wall Street premiere,
and it's all fun and games until you pull your d--- out of your pants. She's like,
'Alright, you know, I think I've got enough of your body of work.'"
"At least that part of your body."
"Exactly."
Hill was actually wearing a prosthetic private part,
but that didn't exactly cover up the awkwardness.
If you only know Aubrey Plaza as the deadpan but surprisingly sincere April Ludgate on Parks and
Recreation, watching her movies might come as a bit of a shock to you. She tends to pick projects
that are of a piece with April's misanthropic outsider tendencies, but much more extreme.
She played a wannabe time traveler in the sci-fi comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, a zombie
in Life After Beth, a sadistic nun in The Little Hours, and an aspiring influencer-slash-stalker
in Ingrid Goes West. She even got busy with Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa!
But it was the 2020 psychological thriller Black Bear that truly proved
to be too much for Plaza's family to bear. In the mind-bending film,
she plays an actress on the edge of a breakdown due to her director husband's emotional abuse.
But it wasn't the dark plot that worried her family so much as the tough production
conditions. When she was interviewed by Adam Sandler for Interview Magazine,
she revealed that the shoot was difficult and involved a lot of nights. As she described it,
"We were living in these weird cabins in the middle of nowhere [...] The
lines started to get blurred toward the end because we shot it chronologically,
and I started to not really know what was real or not. I really fell apart afterwards."
Her family was understandably worried about her because she wasn't her typical self.
Her parents did eventually see the movie, although her mom was apparently horrified.
"I'm in a very vulnerable position in the movie, and it's excruc- it's painful to watch."
In 1989, Julia Roberts was best known for making moviegoers cry
in her Oscar-nominated role as Shelby in Steel Magnolias. Soon thereafter, she graduated to
leading lady status by taking the iconic part of sex worker Vivian in 1990's Pretty Woman.
Roberts won over audiences and Richard Gere's corporate raider Edward
with her bathtub karaoke, legendary comeback to a snooty sales assistant,
and combination of toughness and vulnerability. But none of that changed the fact that she was
worried about what her mom would think. As she explained to Rolling Stone,
"My mom works for the Catholic archdiocese of Atlanta [...] I mean, my mom's boss baptized me."
Hoping to avoid the inevitable,
Roberts tried evasive maneuvers by calling her mom at work and telling her,
"Hi, mom, I got a job [...] It's a Disney movie! I've got to go, talk to you later.'"
Pretty Woman was released by Buena Vista Pictures,
Disney's former film distribution studio, so she technically wasn't lying. And hopefully the Best
Lead Actress Oscar nomination she eventually got for the movie helped smooth things over as well.
The 2012 film Flight should probably never be watched by anyone who's ever felt the tiniest
sliver of fear of flying. It stars Denzel Washington as pilot Whip Whitaker, who averts
a plane crash by rolling the jet, even though he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol at
the time. Most of the passengers and crew survive, but not Katerina, the flight attendant played by
Nadine Velazquez. It couldn't have been easy for the actress' parents to watch their daughter's
character die, but that's not why she waited until a month before the movie came out to tell them
about it. As it turns out, she was more worried about what they would think of the explicit scene
of Katerina and Whip spending the night together. As she explained to the Chicago Tribune,
"I knew they wouldn't have understood. I would have felt guilty doing it had
I [told them] when I got the offer. So I just waited until it was done."
Her parents' responses ended up being what she'd expected. As she recalled,
"My mom was horrified for about five seconds.
And my dad in the background was like, 'No, you didn't.'"
Since the scene in question happens within the first ten minutes,
she advised them to just show up late.
A movie about rival ballerinas that comes out during the holiday season and stars a Harvard
graduate might sound on paper like a mom-friendly choice for a family trip to the movies.
But 2010's Black Swan is less about the dancing and more about the terrifying psychological toll
of a highly competitive athletic profession, which is why Mila Kunis' mom was wary of her
daughter's part in the film. The actress lost a significant amount of weight for the part,
to the point that her mom was legitimately worried about her. As Kunis recalled to E!,
"My mom freaked out. Everybody started panicking. She was like,
'You have to promise me this isn't going to affect you.' I was like, 'I promise it won't,
but it might take me a little time to be okay with having a little more fat on me.'"
The experience opened Kunis' eyes to the movie industry's unhealthy concept of what makes for
a good-looking body. Fortunately, though, she managed to keep her promise to her mom,
as it took her a mere five days to gain back the 20 pounds that she'd lost.
If you're an actor with parents who are also actors, that doesn't mean
they're going to automatically be happy with all the roles you choose,
as Dakota Johnson has discovered. Her parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, who both
have their own experience with taking their clothes off on screen. But when Dakota landed
the coveted lead role in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, her mom couldn't bring herself to watch.
When mother and daughter were on the red carpet together at the 2015 Oscars,
ABC's Lara Spencer asked Griffith if she would see Fifty Shades of Grey, to which she replied,
"I don't think I can. I think it would be strange."
Dakota said that it was fine that her mom didn't want to watch it,
but she still held out some hope that she would change her mind.
When Spencer assured Griffith that her daughter was very good in the movie,
Griffith said that she didn't need to watch it to know that, to which Dakota responded,
"All right! You don't have to see it!"
Griffith apparently kept her word, at least for a few more years. In 2018, Dakota told Hello!
Magazine that neither of her parents had seen any of the Fifty Shades movies, as she explained,
"It's inappropriate for them. But they're okay about it."
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