You probably go out of your way to avoid that one coworker you can’t stand, but if you were an actor, avoiding them might be impossible — especially if they play your character’s other half.
Here are 16 onscreen couples who allegedly hated each other IRL:
1.
When The Vampire Diaries first began filming, Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley “despised each other so much that it read as love.” In 2019, Nina told the Directionally Challenged podcast, “We really just didn’t get along the first five months of shooting… We ended up getting to a good place, and it was fine. Of everyone, I think I probably see him the most and hang out with him the most. We’re probably the closest.”
Responding to her comments, Paul told Entertainment Tonight, “We totally clashed. We didn’t [get along]. Creatively, it just wasn’t in sync. The fans would never have known that. We’re basically driving each other insane and then after a few seasons, we developed this absolute mutual love.”
2.
According to a 2016 Us Weekly report, Castle costars Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic “completely despise each other.” A source alleged, “They will not speak when they are off set, and this has been going on for seasons now… This season, it got so out of hand they made Stana and Nathan go to couples counseling together.”
However, Stana’s reps told the outlet that she “had absolutely no issues” with Nathan, and his reps didn’t respond to their request for comment.
3.
Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey had a difficult time filming Dirty Dancing together. In his 2009 memoir The Time of My Life, he wrote, “We did have a few moments of friction when we were tired or after a long day of shooting. She seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her. Other times, she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she’d start laughing.”
He also said, “I was on overdrive for the whole shoot — staying up all night to do rewrites, squeezing in dance rehearsals, shooting various scenes — and was exhausted a lot of the time. I didn’t have a whole lot of patience for doing multiple retakes.”
Their tension seemingly dated back to Red Dawn, a movie they costarred in before Dirty Dancing. In 2022, Jennifer told The View, “Patrick was playing pranks on me and everybody. It was just, like, macho, and I just couldn’t take it. I was just like, ‘Please, this guy, that’s enough with him.’ … [During the Dirty Dancing screen test] he pulled me down the hall and said to me, ‘I love you, I love you, and I’m so sorry. And I know you don’t want me to do the movie.’ And he got the tears in his eyes. And I got the tears in my eyes — not for the same reason. I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s working me.’ And he goes, ‘We could kill it — we could kill it if we did this.’ We go in there, and he takes me in his arms, and I was like, ‘Oh, boy. I’m done.'”
4.
Discussing the “most difficult celebrity” she’s worked with on Watch What Happens Live in 2016, Busy Philipps said, “James Franco and I really didn’t get along when we were on Freaks and Geeks. We were 19, and we really, really disliked each other. It’s well-documented. He shoved me to the ground once. It was really brutal… We’re friends now, and we really like each other now, as adults, but as kids, we did not get along.”
5.
In 2010, Jay Mohr told Elle that his “most awkward interaction with a female celebrity” was “being on the set of a movie where the leading woman was unhappy with [his] presence and made it clear from day one.” Though he didn’t confirm who he was talking about at the time, the interviewer looked at his filmography and pointed out that he could only be talking about Jennifer Aniston, his Picture Perfect costar.
Jay said, “I hadn’t done many movies, and even though they screen-tested some pretty famous guys, I somehow snaked into the leading role. The actress said, ‘No way! You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Loudly. Between takes. To other actors on set. I would literally go to my mom’s house and cry.”
On a 2011 episode of his podcast Mohr Stories, he alleged that, when Jennifer saw him on set, she complained about him to other people, saying, “Six guys they screen-test! Six! … The one fucking guy I hate, that’s the guy they hire!” Jennifer has never publicly addressed Jay’s comments.
6.
When a fan called into Jay Thomas’s radio show to ask what being on Cheers was like, the actor reportedly replied, “It’s brutal. I have to kiss Rhea Perlman.”
In his 2022 book Directed by James Burrows, series co-creator James Burrows wrote, “That was it. He insulted Rhea, which meant he insulted all of us. He crossed the family… Jay was fired unceremoniously. Since he was no longer on the show, Eddie [Lebec, his character] also had to go. In our world, you don’t wind up sleeping with the fishes; you die a violent yet comedic death.”
However, Thomas previously denied this version of events. In 2012, he told GQ, “I’m doing Cheers, having the greatest time of my life, and one day I get a phone call from Jimmy [Burrows]. I knew they were deciding [about] whether to add me or Bebe [Neuwirth] to the cast full-time, and I thought he was calling with good news. He said, like in a movie, ‘Are you sitting down?’ And he goes, ‘Look, we’re not going to have you back on the show. And it has nothing to do with Rhea.’ …[Listeners on the radio show] would go, ‘What’s it like to kiss Carla?’ Not Rhea — they were talking about Carla. And my joke [was] that I got combat’s pay to kiss her.”
7.
According to Digital Spy, while filming Four Christmases, Reese Witherspoon reportedly got frustrated with her costar Vince Vaughn because his nonchalant attitude conflicted with her perfectionism. Further reports alleged she refused to film a sex scene that was written in the script. However, Reese denied rumors of a feud, and, in the press, the costars had nothing but kind things to say about each other.
At the movie’s premiere, Reese told the Hollywood Reporter, “He’s the greatest. And he’s so funny, and every day was, like, something new and funny would come out of his mouth. You don’t even know where it comes from. It was just so exciting to be with somebody who’s just constantly thinking of funny things and really bringing everybody into it, too. So, everybody was being funny.”
Vince told ScreenSlam, “Reese takes her work very seriously. She works very hard at her part, and definitely her work matters to her. She’s very focused on what she does performance-wise, and she was really easy to play off of.”
8.
On the set of The Notebook, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams argued a lot, and it reached a point where he felt he couldn’t work with her. Director Nick Cassavetes told VH1, “Maybe I’m not supposed to tell this story, but they were really not getting along one day on set. Really not. And Ryan came to me, and there’s 150 people standing in this big scene, and he says, ‘Nick, come here.’ And he’s doing a scene with Rachel, and he says, ‘Would you take her out of here and bring in another actress to read off camera with me?’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘I can’t. I can’t do it with her. I’m just not getting anything from this.'”
Nick continued, “We went into a room with a producer; they started screaming and yelling at each other. I walked out. At that point, I was smoking cigarettes. I smoked a cigarette, and everybody came out like, ‘All right, let’s do this.’ And it got better after that, you know? They had it out…I think Ryan respected her for standing up for her character, and Rachel was happy to get that out in the open. The rest of the film wasn’t smooth sailing, but it was smoother sailing.”
Of course, that’s not the end of the story! Ryan and Rachel famously experienced an “enemies to lovers” romance, and they dated for two years after the movie’s release.
9.
In 1993, Julia Roberts told the New York Times her I Love Trouble costar Nick Nolte could be “completely charming and very nice” but “he’s also completely disgusting.” She said, “From the moment I met him, we sort of gave each other a hard time, and naturally, we get on each other’s nerves… He’s going to hate me for saying this, but he seems [to] go out of his way to repel people. He’s a kick.”
In 2022, Nick told Insider that he hadn’t reached out to her to bury the hatchet, “though it’s buried.” He said, “I mean, it was absurd what we went through. It was partly my fault and a little bit of hers. Julia got married at the beginning of that film, and it was one of those things where I just approached it all wrong.”
10.
While shooting Romeo + Juliet, Claire Danes reportedly got tired of Leonardo DiCaprio constantly playing pranks and found him immature, whereas he allegedly thought she was too uptight. They reportedly didn’t really talk to each other between takes.
However, she later admitted she had a bit of a crush on him at the time. In 2018, she told W Magazine, “That was problematic. I couldn’t really have a crush on the guy I was professionally having a crush on!”
11.
Though they went on to be close friends, The X-Files costars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny didn’t always get along. In 2015, she told the Guardian, “I mean, yes, there were definitely periods when we hated each other. Hate is too strong a word. We didn’t talk for long periods of time. It was intense, and we were both pains in the arse for the other at various times… I’m not going to get into it. I’m not even going to begin to get into that. But we are closer today than we ever have been.”
12.
Jason Alexander didn’t like working with Heidi Swedberg on Seinfeld because he “couldn’t figure out how to play off of her.” On the Howard Stern Show, he said, “Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring. And she would do something, and I would go, ‘OK, I see what she’s going to do — I’m going to adjust to her.’ And I’d adjust, and then it would change.”
The rest of the cast also found her “fucking impossible” to work with as an actor, though they had nothing against her as a person. Jason said, “And Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] actually said, ‘Don’t you want to just kill her?’ And Larry went, ‘Ka-bang!'”
However, Jason later apologized for how he told that story, tweeting, “OK, folks, I feel officially awful. The impetus for telling this story was that Howard said, ‘Julia Louis-Dreyfus told me you all wanted to kill her.’ So I told the story to try and clarify that no one wanted to kill Heidi… [She] was generous and gracious, and I am so mad at myself for retelling this story in any way that would diminish her. If I had had more maturity or more security in my own work, I surely would have taken her query and possibly tried to adjust the scenes with her. She surely offered. But, I didn’t have that maturity or security.”
13.
Sarah Silverman had a terrible time guest-starring as Kramer’s girlfriend on Seinfeld. On a 2021 episode of her podcast, she said, “I will tell you this: Everyone was really nice, but I had a bad experience with Michael Richards. The first scene I shot, I’m in bed with Kramer, and he’s scared because he hears noises. He says something like, ‘What was that noise?’ Then my line is, ‘It’s probably the wind.'”
However, she flubbed her line and said, “It’s probably the rain.” Sarah continued, “This guy, Michael Richards, breaks character and just starts ripping me a new asshole… He points to the window and he goes, ‘Do you see rain in that window? Do you see rain in that window?’ and I go, ‘No,’ and he says, ‘Then why did you say rain? It’s not rain. There’s no rain in that window! The line is wind!”
She felt a “lump in [her] throat” and was upset he got away with treating her that way. The next day, while shooting a diner scene, he acted polite and tried to talk to her. She recalled, “And finally, I just cut him off, and I say, ‘I don’t give a fuck!’… And he’s kind of stunned, and it’s like he snapped out of it a little. He understood what I was saying was, ‘You don’t talk like that and act like nothing happened. I’m not going to be one of those people that joins in and acts like nothing happened. That was shitty behavior.” Afterwards, he was more gracious.
14.
When a New York Post interviewer brought up the time her A Change of Seasons costar Anthony Hopkins called her “the most obnoxious actor” he ever worked with, Shirley MacLaine said, “I didn’t like him either… But he was on the wagon [abstaining from drinking alcohol] at that time, and it was hard on him.”
15.
In his 2010 memoir An Actor and a Gentleman, Louis Gossett Jr. alleged that his An Officer and a Gentleman costars Richard Gere and Debra Winger “couldn’t have stayed farther apart from each other.” He also wrote, “The onscreen chemistry between the two of them was terrific, but it was a different story once the camera was turned off.”
However, they went on to be on friendly terms. In 2002, she told the Guardian, “I run in to Richard Gere quite a lot, and he half jokes: ‘Are you still saying terrible things about me?’ We had a moment in our life which was not good, but everyone has to get it into perspective. I had this reputation for being ‘difficult.’ But would a man have suffered the same accusation? He would probably have been admired for speaking his mind and be called a ‘perfectionist.'”
16.
And finally, in her 2013 memoir Unsinkable, Debbie Reynolds wrote that Gene Kelly, her Singin’ in the Rain costar/director, was a “cruel taskmaster.” She added, “He came to rehearsals and criticized everything I did and never gave me a word of encouragement.”
She also alleged that he made unwanted advances toward her during a kissing scene, writing, “The camera closed in. Gene took me tightly in his arms…and shoved his tongue down my throat. ‘Eeew! What was that?’ I screeched, breaking free of his grasp and spitting. I ran around frantic, yelling for some Coca-Cola to cleanse my mouth. It was the early 1950s, and I was an innocent kid who had never been French-kissed. It felt like an assault. I was stunned that this 39-year-old man would do this to me.”
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