12 Movie Star Feuds That Were No Day at the Beach

Here are 12 movie star feuds that escalated quickly. Some have made up — but others never will.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron

The personality clashes betweeen Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron are well documented in Kyle Buchanan’s 2022 book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road.

The film's director, George Miller, elaborated a bit in our recent cover story on the Fury Road prequel Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

“I think Tom felt bewildered by the role, as is well documented in the book,” Miller said. “Charlize was always first on set, no matter what. And Tom was always the last on set. Even in that simple behavior, you’ve got the basic conflict which threatened to really undermine the production.”

Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts

Among the many actresses Grant has admitted to falling out with is Julia Roberts, with whom he starred in the 1999 rom-com Noting Hill (above). Apparently, they didn't get along so well together on set, because Grant had a few things to say about her later.

Grant called Roberts “very big-mouthed," on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2004, according to Australia's News.com. "Literally, physically, she has a very big mouth. When I was kissing her I was aware of a faint echo."

On a 2015 episode of Andy Cohen's Watch What Happens Live, Grant responded to a fan question about whether he and Roberts had kept in touch after Notting Hill: “I’ve probably made too many jokes about the size of her mouth. She might hate me by now,” he said.

Also Read: 10 '90s Rom-Coms That Will Have You at Hello

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis

The feud between Whatever Happened to Baby Jane co-stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis is one of the most well-documented in Hollywood history.

It all started when Joan Crawford's divorce announcement upstaged Bette Davis' publicity campaign for her first leading-lady role in Ex-Lady, which ended up flopping due to poor ticket sales in 1933.

Things got worse when Crawford married Franchot Tone, the handsome actor whom Davis had developed a massive crush on while starring opposite him in Dangerous in 1935. Davis believed that Crawford has purposefully stolen him from, her out of spite.

"I have never forgiven her for that, and never will," Davis told journalist Michael Thornton in 1987, according to Harper's Bazaar. "She took him from me... She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness."

Crawford is quoted as saying in her biography Not The Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford: A Personal Biography: "Franchot said he thought Bette was a good actress, but he never thought of her as a woman." 

Sick burn.

Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep

During the making of 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer (above), Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep clashed when the actor started using his method acting techniques on her. Streep told The New York Times in 2018 that Hoffman had slapped her during a scene without her permission.

“That was when we were making Kramer vs. Kramer. This is tricky because when you’re an actor, you’re in a scene, you have to feel free. I’m sure that I have inadvertently hurt people in physical scenes. But there’s a certain amount of forgiveness in that. But this was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me,” she said. “And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”

Kramer vs. Kramer producer Richard Fischoff also told Vanity Fair that Hoffman used the recent cancer death of Streep’s fiance, The Godfather actor John Cazale, to trigger emotions in her performance: “He was goading her and provoking her,” Fischoff remembered, “using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.”

Also Read: 13 Movies About the World's Oldest Profession That Sugarcoat Things Quite a Bit

Sacha Baron Cohen and Rebel Wilson

Rebel Wilson’s feud with Sacha Baron Cohen started a decade ago during the making of The Brothers Grimsby (above), in which Cohen plays Nobby, a dimwitted English man who lives in a fishing village with his girlfriend, played by Wilson. Back in 2014, she called Cohen “outrageous” on Australian radio show Kyle and Jackie O, accusing him of pressuring her to go naked in a Grimsby scene.

But the feud really started to heat up last year, when Wilson began teasing her memoir Rebel Rising, in which she dedicates a whole chapter to Cohen.

Calling him an “a------,” she wrote: “I rue the day that I met Sacha Baron Cohen. ‘Never meet your idols,’ people say. No s---!” She also accuses him of repeatedly asking her to “stick your finger up my a–-” and creating an environment on set in which it felt uncomfortable to say no to him.

A rep for Baron Cohen responded to MovieMaker: “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby.”

Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra

The famous feud between Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra began on the set of their 1955 film Guys and Dolls (above). It would be another 17 years until Brando would win (and turn down) his best actor Oscar for The Godfather, but Sinatra had already won the best supporting actor award for From Here to Eternity in 1954.

Sinatra had wanted Brando's role, Sky, in Guys and Dolls, but settled for the other lead, Nathan. And on top of that, he had also lost Brando's iconic role of Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, and he was apparently still bitter when they started shooting Guys and Dolls together.

More on the Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando Feud

"[Sinatra] saw in Marlon a figurehead of youthful rebellion, an avatar of all that threatened his career. The wounded swagger notwithstanding, Sinatra was a deeply insecure man in the mid-fifties," Stefan Kanfer wrote in his 2008 book Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.

Then, Kanfer writes, Brando dared to ask Sinatra to run lines together, since he didn't have as much experience working in musicals as Sinatra did. This also irritated Sinatra.

"The tone for the film was set on the first day of rehearsals, when Brando was introduced to Sinatra. "Frank," Marlon confided, sotto voce, "I've never done anything like this before, and I was wondering, maybe I could come to your dressing room and we could just run the dialogue together? Sinatra was succinct: "Don't give me any of that Actors Studio s---," Kanfer writes.

Lucy Liu and Bill Murray

Lucy Liu and Bill Murray had an uncomfortable incident on the set of the 2000 movie Charlie’s Angels. (They're pictured with Drew Barrymore, above.)

On a 2021 episode of the Asian Enough podcast from the Los Angeles Times, Liu reflected on an an uncomfortable incident on the set of the 2000 movie Charlie’s Angels. She said Murray got angry after he discovered that a scene involving the two of them had been rewritten.

“As we’re doing the scene, Bill starts to sort of hurl insults, and I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on,” Liu said, calling his language towards her “inexcusable and unacceptable." She added: "I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it."

She also said that she has “nothing against Bill Murray at all. I’ve seen him since then at an SNL reunion, and he came up to me and was perfectly nice… But I’m not going to sit there and be attacked.”

Murray gave his side of the story to The Times of London in 2009, saying: “Look, I will dismiss you completely if you are unprofessional and working with me. When our relationship is professional, and you’re not getting that done, forget it.”

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Vin Diesel and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson

Diesel and Johnson have had a long-documented feud that seems to have started in 2016 when The Rock complained about his male co-stars on the eighth The Fast and Furious movie, calling them, including Diesel, "candy a--es."

"My female co-stars are always amazing and I love 'em. My male co-stars however are a different story," he wrote in a since deleted post. "Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don't. The ones that don't are too chickens--- to do anything about it anyway. Candy a--es."

There was a lot more drama that happened that Insider aptly breaks down — but you should know that as of June 1, Johnson declared the feud over.

""Last summer, @vindiesel and I put all the past behind us," Johnson wrote on Instagram. "We’ll lead with brotherhood and resolve - and always take care of the franchise, characters & FANS that we love."

Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere

The Rocky and American Gigolo stars were supposed to star together in 1974's The Lords of Flatbush, until Gere was fired and replaced by Perry King.

Stallone told Ain't It Cool his side of the story in 2006: "Yeah, the original part of Chico, which was played by Perry King, was originally supposed to be played by Richard Gere, but we never hit it off."

Stallone added: "He would strut around in his oversized motorcycle jacket like he was the baddest knight at the round table. One day, during an improv, he grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away. I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with. "

More on Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere

Stallone continued: "Then we were rehearsing at Coney Island and it was lunchtime, so we decided to take a break, and the only place that was warm was in the backseat of a Toyota. I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper. I said, 'That thing is going to drip all over the place.' He said, 'Don’t worry about it.' I said, 'If it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.'

"He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay. Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me. "

It worked out fine for everyone: Stallone went on to Rocky fame, and Gere was soon toplining films like American Gigolo (above)

Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Another Sylvester Stallone feud? Yes, another Sylvester Stallone film. When Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to break into Hollywood, Sly was the king of the muscle-bound franchise, having written and starred in Rocky and further proved his chops with First Blood.

But when Ahnold starred in Conan the Barbarian — and then The Terminator — Stallone suddenly had a rival. The two vied for box office supremacy through the '80s. Knowing they were often up for the same roles, Schwarzenegger even famously tricked Stallone into doing the 1992 Stop! Or My My Will Shoot by feigning intense interest in the film. (Schwarzenegger had figured out faster than Stallone that it wouldn't succeed.)

That's Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger with Jason Statham in Expendables 2 — which brings us to our next slide.

More on the Stallone and Schwarzenegger Feud

But they also had fun with the feud, as when they surprised everyone by attending the same massive celebration at Cannes Film Festival on May 12, 1990. All attendees wondered if they would clash, until they surprised everyone.

"To the amazement of all, the pair turned to each other, locked hands, and started to dance, waltzing in circles around the terrace," recounted Nick De Semlyn in his excellent book The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage.

By the next year, they were partners in the restaurant franchise Planet Hollywood. And they later appeared together in films including Escape Plan and the Expendables franchise. That's them in Expendables 3, above.

Selma Blair and Charlie Sheen

The Legally Blonde actress and the Platoon actor had a huge falling out when Blair had a fraught exit from Sheen's 2012 FX sitcom Anger Management.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, after Blair questioned his work ethic, Sheen fired her from the show, on which she played his love interest, via a text in which he called her a "c---."

But in an interview with Jay Leno, Sheen described the encounter differently.

“One of our primary characters, Selma Blair, who played Kate, was written out because [the show] was not about our relationship, and the problem was too many people were still excited about the Two and a Half [Men] character and thought the Anger Management character was a little dull,” Sheen told Leno in 2013.

Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe

The contentious working relationship between Olivier and Monroe is told in the 2011 drama My Week With Marilyn, with Kenneth Branagh playing Olivier and Michelle Williams playing Monroe.

When Olivier and Monroe starred together in 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl, they had very different approaches to acting. Monroe adhered closely to the Lee Strasberg school of method acting, having been coached by Strasberg's second wife, Paula. But Olivier was a traditional Shakespearean actor and didn't respect her approach at all.

"They were sort of talking two different languages at this point," My Week With Marilyn director Simon Curtis told NPR in 2011: "Oliver was an institutional figure of traditional British theater-based external acting," while "Marilyn was a real devotee of the Strasberg school, you know, the Method — which meant that she loved to investigate inside the character."

More on the Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier Feud

Olivier also had another issue.

"Marilyn would show up late, sometimes as late as three days late, and that created, often, comic frustration for Olivier," Branagh told NPR. I don't know how funny he found it at the time but in the movie, it allows us to perhaps sympathize or empathize for a bit with his plight. He doesn't always deal with it well."

The Prince and The Showgirl was a flop — but My Week With Marilyn did pretty well, generating $35 million at the box office and garnering decent reviews and currently sitting at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Main image: An early publicity photo of Marilyn Monroe, prior to her Laurence Olivier feud.