Being a big personality is something that comes with the job when you're an actor. And quite often the biggest personalities have translated into the most successful careers. Jack Nicholson wouldn't have become Jack Nicholson if he hadn't been Jack Nicholson, if you follow us.
But it's a tightrope. Sometimes they can tip from 'big personality' to 'big pain in the arse'. Here are some actors who famously made things difficult on the sets of their films.
1. Mickey Rourke – Angel Heart
It's no secret that the star of The Wrestler and Sin City had some personal problems in his early acting career that made him tricky to work with, to say the least. Alan Parker, who directed Rourke in Angel Heart, commented that "working with Mickey is a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do."
Rourke quit acting to return to professional boxing, before making a screen comeback that eventually saw him earn a Best Actor Oscar nomination in 2008 for his performance in The Wrestler.
Rourke himself reckoned his past misdeeds might have ruled him out of the win. "It's voted for by people from the movie business and in the past I've hacked them all off. I was good at that. It came easy to me," he told the Daily Mail.
"I stupidly said acting wasn't a job for a real man. I threatened producers, raged at directors, forgot my agent's name. I really burned my bridges. And a lot of people have long memories.'"
2. Mariah Carey – The House
The singer was supposed to have a cameo in Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell's comedy The House, but things got off to a bad start when she showed up to the set hours late.
"One script note was like, 'I don't want to do the scene'," Ferrell told Andy Cohen. "Even though it was totally approved ahead of time.
"[It was] hard with clearance and it became quite a kerfuffle. AKA a shitstorm."
Ferrell claimed that he was left waiting in his trailer until 11pm, when someone knocked to tell him he could go home.
3. Christian Bale – Terminator Salvation
Christian Bale was famously recorded (by a crew member who broke his "magic circle" of on-set trust) going what can only be described as 'King Kong-scale apeshit' at the director of photography Shane Hurlbut on Terminator Salvation.
The audio – which included Bale dropping 39 F-bombs and threatening to quit after Hurlbut accidentally stepped into shot – went everywhere.
Bale admitted to Total Film that the recording didn't perhaps show him at his best. (That's no excuse for breaking the circle though, guys.)
"Hey, I did what I did. I'm not hiding from that. I went overboard. But there is an essential trust and it's not a tacit one, it's a verbal one, a spoken one, which is [that] every sound guy says, 'We are not only not recording, we're not even listening'.
"So, well, there goes that. I do stress, though, it's not in any way a trust that's there to cover up bad behaviour. It's not about that. It's an essential trust that's needed for creativity."
4. Lawrence Tierney – Reservoir Dogs
The late Lawrence Tierney had a reputation for being a real-life Hollywood tough guy, spending much of the late '40s and early '50s getting into drunken bar fights, for which he was arrested 12 times. He tore a phone off a wall, tried to strangle a student, choked a taxi driver and hit a waiter in the face with a sugar bowl. It all sounds utterly exhausting, to be honest.
By the time he took a supporting role as Joe Cabot in the directorial debut of a young filmmaker called Quentin Tarantino, he had quit the sauce but hadn't discovered a mellower outlook.
"Tierney was a complete lunatic by that time – he just needed to be sedated," Tarantino told BAFTA.
"He was personally challenging to every aspect of filmmaking. By the end of the week everybody on set hated Tierney – it wasn't just me. And in the last 20 minutes of the first week we had a blow out and got into a fist fight. I fired him, and the whole crew burst into applause."
True to form, Tierney went home, fired a shotgun at his nephew and ended up in prison (again). Later on, he had a guest appearance in Seinfeld where he made a 'pretend' attempt to stab Jerry Seinfeld with a stolen knife. What a hero.
5. Gene Hackman – The Royal Tenenbaums
The cast and crew of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenebaums have talked at length about what a nightmare it was to work with Gene Hackman, admitting that they were all scared of him. He allegedly called Anderson a "c**t" and told him to "pull up your pants and act like a man".
Apparently Bill Murray – who was the only one not intimidated by Hackman's extreme irascibility – started coming in even when he wasn't supposed to be on set and standing around wearing a cowboy hat, watching to make sure that everyone else was okay.
Hackman's behaviour has been attributed to his really not wanting to be in the film. Apparently he hated taking on roles that were written with him specifically in mind.
"Gene passed for a year and a half or something like that," said Anderson. "I also think he was sort of forced to do the movie and that was not fair really. I think I just kept asking him, kept bothering him, I just wore him down. I didn't really have much access to him, I don't know how I really went about that but eventually he just caved."
Yeah, we might be a bit grumpy too after that.
6. Faye Dunaway – Chinatown
The legendary Faye Dunaway has always had a reputation for being a challenging actress to work with, so it came as a surprise to no one that she clashed with director Roman Polanski on the set of Chinatown.
"I thought, she may be impossible with other people but not with me," Polanski told Sabotage Times. Producer Robert Evans said that he measured the line of people queuing to tell the director 'I told you so' in "miles rather than metres".
Dunaway recounts bullying on set, while Polanski describes her as being touchy and difficult. Whatever the case, this culminated in a famous (although possibly apocryphal) story about Dunaway throwing a cup of urine in her director's face.
Of course, no one is arguing that Polanski himself is anywhere close to being a saint at this point. Dear God, no. But that's a whole other matter.
7. Marlon Brando – Everything
Reputations are fragile things. These days, Marlon Brando is remembered as much for being a complete nightmare to work with as he is for being one of the greatest actors of his generation. (And also for banging Richard Pryor, apparently.)
The later years of his career throw up a load of stories, such as the time he earned millions for his brief appearance as Jor-El in Superman but refused to read the script.
Or the time he showed up for the shooting of Apocalypse Now massively overweight and – again – totally unprepared for his part.
But his ultimate acts of misbehaviour were on The Island of Dr Moreau, in which he had his lines fed through an earpiece, wore an ice bucket he'd found as a hat, and insisted that he would only act if a dwarf he had befriended sat next to him at all times.
(Admittedly, Moreau was a mess all on its own. "I was just so bored, I didn't know what else to do," Brando later commented.)
His final film was The Score, in which, contrary to rumour, he did wear trousers. However he also clashed constantly with director Frank Oz, who he insisted on calling 'Miss Piggy' (Oz's legendary Muppets role). Eventually Oz had to leave and let Robert De Niro direct Brando's scenes.
8. Sonny Landham – Predator
A special bonus entry, this one. The production team hired the late Landham a bodyguard for the duration of the Predator shoot – not to keep him safe, but to protect the crew from him. It's not exactly that the one-time porn star and later political candidate behaved badly (he played Billy, the tracker), more that he was expected to.
So notorious was his propensity for losing his temper and getting in fights, it was just considered sensible to plan for the worst.
