Why Hollywood Stopped Casting These Actors In 2018
In the midst of all the joy and triumph of famous and talented people winning awards at televised awards shows comes that "In Memoriam" montage of all the people in movies or music or whatever who died over the past year. It gives everyone a chance to reflect and have a good ugly cry. The Oscars and other shows should really add an "In Memoriam" segment for the careers that died, too.
There is no shortage of actors and actresses, and busloads of new blood arrive from the Midwest every day to push out the old and familiar. That's a natural pattern, but there are also those celebrities whose careers end because they did something absolutely horrible, or experienced a series of horrible things, or just can't put butts in cineplex seats anymore. Here are some people Hollywood seemingly and quietly parted ways with in 2018 — folks we might see in that theoretical career "goodbye" segment at the Emmys or Oscars.
Charlie Sheen's tiger blood made him a handful on set
It's been a steady downward decline for Charlie Sheen since he blew up his career in 2011, when he publicly lashed out at his Two and a Half Men boss, Chuck Lorre. After claiming to have tiger blood running through his veins and disclosing that he is HIV positive, Sheen's career has fallen from the heights of a top-rated network sitcom to starring on a formulaic basic cable comedy called Anger Management to ... not much.
Outing himself as an extremely problematic person to work with, Sheen hasn't done much in the past few years. He had cameos in Machete Kills, Scary Movie 5 (as himself), and The Goldbergs (reprising his delinquent character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off), and in 2017, he guest-starred on two episodes of comedian Nick Swardson's Typical Rick. His only acting credit in 2018: a Lil Pump video for a single titled "Drug Addicts." At the time of this writing, Sheen doesn't seem to have any projects lined up for the next year or beyond.
Jeffrey Tambor's career was 'Arrested' by his behavior
Up until recently, Jeffrey Tambor was among television's most respected, well-liked, and versatile actors. An industry veteran of quality, groundbreaking television, he earned four Emmy nominations for his work as self-absorbed talk show sidekick Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, then moved on to portray a comically terrible father and fallen construction tycoon wanted for a little "light treason" on Arrested Development. Then he found the role of a lifetime: Maura Pfefferman, a late-in-life individual transitioning from male to female on Amazon's Transparent. He won two Emmys for his delicate and sensitive work. That makes his alleged behavior on the set of that series all the more shocking and disappointing.
In February 2018, Amazon fired Tambor from Transparent after costar Trace Lysette accused the actor of multiple acts of sexual harassment, including allegedly pushing himself up against her while she was scantily costumed. Tambor also reportedly made some very inappropriate comments via social media to his assistant, Van Barnes. The actor denied any wrongdoing, but all of that in the midst of the "Me Too" and "Time's Up" movements, coupled with the revelations that he verbally harassed Arrested Development costar Jessica Walter, means few in Hollywood are willing to work with Tambor right now.
Take it from Roseanne: Don't sleep and tweet
The comeback and fall of Roseanne Barr happened so fast that the world of TV is still nursing its collective whiplash. Roseanne rejoined ABC's schedule in 2018 at just about the perfect time — the classic and popular blue-collar, Midwestern-set sitcom was a perfect lens through which to examine "Trump's America." The new Roseanne finished the 2017-18 season as the third-most-watched show on TV, but then Barr had to screw it all up.
On May 29, 2018, she tweeted: "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." Barr was referring to Valerie Jarrett, an advisor to President Barack Obama, implying that the political figure shared views with an organization that some have called a terrorist group and likening her appearance to that of an ape — an ugly and old epithet used against African-Americans. Barr apologized, saying her comments were a tasteless joke, but then she blamed her actions on being under the influence of the sleeping pill Ambien. Later on, Barr posted a YouTube video claiming she didn't even know Jarrett was African-American. By then, the damage was done: ABC had canceled Roseanne. The network reworked the show into The Conners, on which Barr's character, just like her career, had died.
Lea Michele was a diva in more ways than one
Lea Michele is supposedly a bit of a "diva." Case in point: Once, when some technical problems led to a shooting delay on the set of Glee, Michele reportedly snapped her fingers and yelled out, "Let's go. I have plans!" But Michele actually is a diva ... in the classical sense of the word. "I came from the theater world," the star of Broadway's Spring Awakening told Allure in 2011, "where the word 'diva' was awesome." But as "awesome" of a performer as she may be, the former Rachel Berry didn't make a lot of friends during her time singing Journey songs with other actors pretending to be teens on Glee.
In costar Naya Rivera's 2016 memoir Sorry Not Sorry (via E! Online), the actress who played Santana Lopez detailed the slow dissolution of their friendship. Rivera claims their relationship crumbled when she cut into Michele's stardom with "bigger plot lines and more screen time." Rivera also said she took the brunt of Michele's blame "for anything and everything that went wrong" on set. Industry big shots potentially being loathe to work with an allegedly problematic individual is one thing, but then add in the fact that Michele's first big post-Glee TV show was a massive failure. In January 2018, ABC canceled her sitcom The Mayor after just nine episodes, so that essentially put the kibosh on her 2018 comeback.
He made some Biggs mistakes
Affable comic actor Jason Biggs has had a few hit movies over the past two decades, but they're almost all entries in the American Pie franchise, which sees his character mature from a pie-loving teen to college student to family man. Producers aren't too keen to bank on the star of flops such as Loser, My Best Friend's Girl, and Saving Silverman. Nor are they going to cast him in shows when his big TV starring vehicle, Mad Love, was canceled after 13 episodes.
Also likely preventing Biggs from landing high on studios' wish lists: He's mean. While a guest on the late Joan Rivers' show In Bed with Joan, Biggs made fun of Pie costar Tara Reid for a botched cosmetic surgery. "No one knows what's going on with Tara's body," he said. Later on, he called Reid a "hot mess" on Watch What Happens Live. He's also made himself look bad on Twitter on several occasions, including some very off-color remarks about Ann Romney and Janna Ryan during the 2012 Republican National Convention (that got him in trouble with his bosses at Nickelodeon, where he voiced Leonardo on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and some jokes about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. Honestly, the last time Biggs made headlines for his on-screen work was when he was let go from the cast of Orange is the New Black in 2015.
'X' marks the spot where David Duchovny's career died
There were few bigger TV stars in the '90s than David Duchovny. As the quirky and brooding Fox Mulder on The X-Files, Duchovny unraveled conspiracies and solved strange mysteries from 1993 on, until he left the show for a while in 1999, to pull a George Clooney and launch a movie career. Alas, Duchovny's transition to film never really took off, apart from the 1998 X-Files movie, that is. He returned to the TV series toward its 2002 endgame, and then starred for seven years on the sexy Showtime show Californication. His next TV project was the NBC drama Aquarius, which was set in California during the era of Charles Manson's campaign of terror. That show tanked, but fortunately for Duchovny, the reboot craze hit, and the revival of The X-Files was a massive hit, finishing the 2015-16 season as the No. 7 show on broadcast TV.
Duchovny didn't work much after that, turning in a brief appearance on Twin Peaks: The Return before he shot another season of the "new" X-Files. This time around, the novelty had apparently worn off because the show dropped all the way down to No. 91 in the ratings. To date, Duchovny doesn't have any projects on the horizon, and it doesn't even look like the X-Files can keep him on screens anymore.
Hollywood was apparently 'Team Edward'
Unfortunately for the dozens of actors who found success early in life, Hollywood has a tendency to tire of these child actors and teen idols, chewing them up and spitting them out before moving on to the next hot thing. Poor Taylor Lautner was both of those things, starring in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 while just a lad, and then portraying teen dream werewolf Jacob Black in all five hugely popular Twilight movies.
Lautner had trouble transitioning to both adult roles and non-teen supernatural romance horror movies — his first starring role came in the drama Abduction, which flopped hard, and few people saw his follow-up films, Tracers and Run the Tide. In 2016, he joined the cast of Ryan Murphy's short-lived show Scream Queens, but then he had to leave the country. Lautner starred on 20 episodes of the British TV comedy Cuckoo, taking over after Andy Samberg left the show. Unfortunately, Lautner's star has faded. He doesn't have anything in the works for 2019 to date, but it was a fun ride, at least. Hey, he got to host SNL and date Taylor Swift.
Oscars don't outweigh the allegations against Kevin Spacey
After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, one of the first actors whose careers ended overnight was Kevin Spacey. A total of 15 people spoke up about Spacey's past assaults and unwanted actions, led by Star Trek: Discovery and Rent star Anthony Rapp, who says Spacey made sexual advances toward him when he was 14 years old. Spacey issued a bizarre statement in which he apologized for his actions, although he said he didn't "remember the encounter" and appeared to shift the narrative by coming out as a gay man.
Not only did Spacey fail to secure future work, but his past and present work came to an end as well. Netflix announced plans to do one more season of House of Cards, but without him (leaving the show in the very capable hands of actress Robin Wright). The filmmakers behind All the Money in the World took the unprecedented step of eliminating Spacey from the finished film entirely. Director Ridley Scott hired Christopher Plummer (and some digital effects wizards) to replace Spacey's work as J. Paul Getty with newly shot scenes of Plummer, and he did this just a few weeks before the film's release. Plummer got a best supporting actor nomination at the Academy Awards, while Spacey has virtually disappeared off the face of the earth.
Where's that girl...where's that girl?
By the end of its seven-season run in 2018, Fox's New Girl was no longer the widely watched or much-discussed show it had been during its first few seasons, but it did make its talented cast of comedy all-stars into viable TV and movie stars. Hannah Simone starred in a pilot for a reboot of The Greatest American Hero that surprisingly wasn't picked up; Damon Wayans Jr. and Max Greenfield moved on to CBS's Happy Together and The Neighborhood, respectively; Lamorne Morris co-starred in the hit Game Night and has a bunch of projects in the works; and Jake Johnson has a new show called Hoops on the way.
Only Zooey Deschanel, the show's biggest star when it began (and for whom the series was initially a vehicle) doesn't have much going on right now. Perhaps she's just taking a break after headlining a sitcom for seven years, or maybe she wants to spend more time with her two kids, both of whom she was pregnant with while New Girl was in production. Let's hope we'll hear more from her down the road.
You can't go home again, Katherine Heigl
Grey's Anatomy hit the air in 2005 and became an instant smash, making a household name out of cast member Katherine Heigl, who played Dr. Izzie Stevens. Scarcely three years later, Heigl started to blow up her career with tactical and pathological precision. In a 2008 interview with Vanity Fair (via The Hollywood Reporter) she called her breakout film, Knocked Up, "a little sexist" among other things. She wasn't necessarily wrong, but she broke the unspoken Hollywood code: One is supposed to be a cheerleader of the projects one stars in. Around the same time, Heigl publicly announced that she'd not submitted herself to the Emmy Awards for her work on Grey's Anatomy. "I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination," Heigl told the Los Angeles Times (via The New York Times), throwing some major shade at her Grey's bosses. By 2010, she was off the show (the writers killed off her character) and scraping together a movie career consisting of minor to moderate successes such as Killers, Life as We Know It, and the accurately titled One for the Money.
The prodigal Heigl then returned to TV with a couple of short-lived shows: State of Affairs and Doubt. However, by 2018, a prickly reputation and a bunch of bombs meant Heigl's only acting work was a gig on Suits, which is most famous for being the TV series Meghan Markle isn't on anymore.
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, whatever happened to Spider-Man?
Maybe actors who play Spider-Man are like Highlanders — there can be only one. That would explain how Tobey Maguire vaporized from Hollywood the way Tom Holland's iteration of Spider-Man did at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. (Of course, former Spidey Sense-tingler Andrew Garfield is still going strong, so who knows?) It seemed like Maguire was the real deal and in it for the long haul in the late '90s and early 2000s with roles in movies such as The Ice Storm, The Cider House Rules, Pleasantville, and, of course, the first three Spider-Man movies. In 2009, he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his excellent work in Brothers as a PTSD-afflicted soldier coming home after fighting in Afghanistan.
He starred in a few box-office stinkers after that (Pawn Sacrifice, The Details) but what might have done in Maguire was his highly unflattering portrayal in Hollywood high-stakes poker game organizer Molly Bloom's 2014 memoir Molly's Game. While several stars merit a mention, Maguire is depicted as a big-time jerk, financially exploiting other players and making Bloom bark for tips. That probably did some damage to his reputation, and it all came back to haunt Maguire in 2018 with the wide release of the film version of Molly's Game. In fact, Maguire's last credited screen role was narrating The Boss Baby in 2017.
Dustin Hoffman is probably done
One could argue that Dustin Hoffman is getting a bit long in the tooth — the legendary actor turned 81 years old in 2018 — and thus aging out of an A-list film career where there just aren't many juicy roles for an octogenarian. (Or he's just consciously slowing down.) That's probably part of the reason why Hoffman's long, Oscar-winning career came to a halt recently — a Hoffman movie hasn't been released since 2017, but there's more to this story.
In December 2017, multiple women came forward to accuse Hoffman of some horrible stuff. One woman says the actor exposed himself to her in a hotel room (when she was a teenager). Another claims he sexually assaulted her during an audio recording session for Ishtar, and another says Hoffman forced himself on her in the back of a car and manipulated her into a sexual act. Yet another accused Hoffman of groping her when they both starred in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. Bottom line: Hoffman looks to be done as far as Hollywood is concerned.
Jeremy Piven can't hug this out
Jeremy Piven was a hard-working character actor for years before he found the role that brought him lasting fame (and three Emmy Awards) as Ari Gold, sleazy agent to dude-bro actor Vincent Chase on the era-defining 2000s comedy Entourage. After that show wrapped in 2011, Piven moved on to slightly more grown-up fare, such as the 2013-16 PBS series Mr. Selfridge, and in 2017, the CBS crime procedural Wisdom of the Crowd.
Alas, it would seem the gross behavior so often embodied on Entourage was the kind of thing that Piven engaged in off-screen, too. Playboy model and The Real Housewives of Toronto star Ariane Bellamar accused Piven of repeatedly groping her in his trailer on the set of Entourage. Piven denied all allegations, but less than a month later, CBS canceled Wisdom of the Crowd. The actor hasn't worked since, and his only future appearance is in the movie All-Star Weekend, which wrapped up filming before the scandal broke.
Hollywood won't cast someone holding it accountable
A lot of the actors on this list won't find work for the foreseeable future (if ever) because their alleged sexual misdeeds and crimes were called out by women empowered by the Me Too and Time's Up movements. Helping to lead the drive to root bad men from Hollywood from the inside out: Rose McGowan. The Charmed, Scream, and Death Proof star has been outspoken and unabashedly assertive in speaking truth to power and calling out bad behavior from the past and present. Her story is one of the most damning against Harvey Weinstein. In 1997, she received a financial settlement (and signed a gag order) over a hotel room incident at the Sundance Film Festival. In October 2017, McGowan said that "HW raped me."
Despite her bravery and heroics, McGowan hasn't seen that translate to job offers. She has one credit to her name in 2018: an appearance in an ad/short film for shoe company Nicholas Kirkwood.
The Lethal Weapon star was allegedly a loose cannon
Over the span of two seasons of work on Fox's TV adaptation of Lethal Weapon, Clayne Crawford apparently went full "method" for his portrayal of out-of-control, loose cannon cop Martin Riggs (played in the films by Mel Gibson). The set of the TV show was not a pleasant place, and he frequently butted heads with co-star Damon Wayans, the Roger Murtaugh to his Riggs. Wayans, who certainly muttered "I'm getting too old for this s***" in the style of his movie predecessor Danny Glover, had quite enough of Crawford's antics one day when he was struck by a piece of falling debris from an on-set explosion. That episodes director: Crawford.
Nevertheless, Fox renewed Lethal Weapon for a third season to air in 2018, but with a caveat: Crawford wouldn't be around for it. Producers hired Seann William Scott to portray a new character and killed off Riggs. Such a high-profile and embarrassing departure will likely affect Crawford's career prospects. He has nothing in the works for 2019 to date.