Some actors receive hate after criminal cases, some receive it after the things they’ve said, and as for others, it’s because they took on a role that went very badly.
Bill Cosby
It’s kind of hard to remember that Bill Cosby once played the kind of TV dad people trusted. It’s part of the reason that everything that followed feels so grim. During the 2010s, dozens of women accused him of sexual misconduct that went back many years.
He was eventually convicted by a Pennsylvania jury in 2018 of drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand. Cosby spent more than two years in prison. It’s no surprise that people hate him so much, it’s hard to believe that America’s dad could have such terrible secrets.
Amber Heard
Amber Heard walked into court in Virginia in 2022. But by that time, the internet had already picked a side. They edited clips from her testimony to make them into jokes, and generally made the trial into some kind of sick entertainment.
It was all because Johnny Depp sued Heard over a 2018 opinion piece, where she talked about domestic abuse. She didn’t name him directly. But the jury found both of them liable for defamation, and the hatred around the case was as loud as it was constant.
Jussie Smollett
The hatred of Jussie Smollett was his own doing, really. He claimed he’d been attacked in Chicago by two men shouting racist and homophobic slurs. Police later accused him of arranging the whole thing with two brothers he knew, however.
A jury convicted Smollett in 2021 on five counts of lying to police. He went to jail for a brief time before the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the conviction. Prosecutors had previously reached an agreement with him. Still, the damage was done, and there was no way he could change the public’s view of him.
Klaus Kinski
Klaus Kinski had more than a reputation for being difficult. No, he had a talent for turning film sets into absolute war zones, and many of his colleagues spoke about it. Take director Werner Herzog, for example, who worked with Kinski five times.
He said that he had extreme screaming matches on film sets. One of them involved Kinski threatening to leave a jungle production while armed locals watched. Kinski’s daughter Pola accused him of repeatedly abusing her as a child, too. He had an ugly reputation that seemed rather deserving of who he was as a person.
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
The death of actress Virginia Rappe is what made Roscoe Arbuckle such a hated figure. She’d originally fallen sick at a party in his San Francisco hotel room in 1921, but then died several days later. It didn’t take long for newspapers to start printing stories about the whole thing.
A lot of them were exaggerated, and many were unsupported. Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter, although two trials ended without a verdict. A third jury acquitted him and even issued an apology. Yet that didn’t rescue his career because the public had made up their minds.
Lena Dunham
The thing with Lena Dunham is that she has a knack for saying or writing things that quickly become a much bigger argument. Her 2014 memoir made many people angry after she described inappropriate behavior with her younger sister.
Both sisters rejected claims that there was any abuse, but still, people hated her for that. It didn’t get better when Dunham defended Girls writer Murray Miller. Actress Aurora Perrineau accused him of sexual assault, but Dunham claimed she had inside information supporting him. She then took back her statement and apologized publicly to Perrineau.
Lea Michele
Some reputations change overnight. That’s pretty much what happened to Lea Michele. Her co-star Samantha Ware accused Michele in June 2020 of making her first television job miserable. Michele apparently threatened people on set, too.
Many former coworkers also shared similar stories, and that was when the backlash began. HelloFresh ended its advertising deal with her. Michele apologized and spoke about her actions. Yet for some people, it was too little, too late.
Armie Hammer
Things unraveled just as quickly for Armie Hammer in early 2021. Messages he’d apparently sent were leaked, and they went beyond normal communication. Violent fantasies, controlling language, references to cannibalism, it was all there.
It only got worse when other women accused him of emotional abuse and coercion. One woman also alleged he’d r***d her in 2017. That led to Hammer’s agency dropping him, and his reputation never recovered from the whole thing.
Ezra Miller
You’d think someone carrying one of Warner Bros.’ biggest superhero movies would try hard to maintain their reputation. But no. Most of the news about Ezra Miller in 2022 was about arrests and police reports, including cases of alleged assault.
Miller was accused of entering a neighbor’s house and taking bottles of alcohol in another case. Miller pleaded guilty to some of the charges. While Miller apologized publicly and said he was receiving mental health treatment, the public had already decided they wouldn’t forgive him.
Jake Lloyd
In 1999, the first Star Wars prequel movie was released, and Jake Lloyd played the role of a young Anakin Skywalker in it. He was only ten years old. But people still treated him like he’d personally ruined Star Wars, and his performance was mocked basically everywhere.
In reviews, on television, other children at school, everyone had something to say. He became so hated that he stopped acting a few years later. It’s kind of hard to accept that people had so much anger toward a little child, but they did.
Allison Mack
Bad behavior on a television set or an offensive post is one thing. Allison Mack did something way worse, as she was a senior member of NXIVM. This cult recruited women and convinced them to share damaging personal information while also performing unpaid work.
Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in 2019 and admitted using compromising material to obtain services from women. She was sentenced to three years in prison. By that time, she’d become one of Hollywood’s most-hated actors for her crimes.
Sacheen Littlefeather
The room wasn’t exactly welcoming. Sacheen Littlefeather walked onto the 1973 Oscars stage and was met with a lot of hostility. Not because of anything bad she’d done, but because of the reason she was there. She was going to decline Marlon Brando’s award for The Godfather.
Brando wanted to protest against Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans, but Littlefeather was left as the scapegoat. She received threats and was mocked for years, while also losing acting work afterward. It took the Academy five decades to apologize for the abuse and discrimination she had faced.
Gina Carano
Disney’s patience was running thin with Gina Carano by early 2021. She’d been arguing online for months, after all, and she’d shared some pretty controversial opinions, including about pronouns. But it all came to a head when she spoke about Jewish people in Nazi Germany.
Carano said that American conservatives were being treated the same way as Jewish people in Nazi Germany. That was it. Lucasfilm cut ties, and her agency, UTA, dropped her, too. People had already been calling for her to be kicked from The Mandalorian. They got what they wanted.
Stacey Dash
One minute, actor Stacey Dash played Dionne in the ‘90s classic film Clueless. The next, she was on Fox News making critical comments about Barack Obama that kicked off arguments. It got to the point where Fox actually suspended Dash as a contributor.
The public turned on Dash, and she became one of America’s most-hated figures. Dash did say later on that she regretted some of her comments, but still. America had already decided that it hated her.
Rachel Zegler
Rachel Zegler didn’t have much time to enjoy being cast as Snow White. The backlash started soon after. Some people objected to her Colombian background and said Snow White should be played by, you know, a white individual.
Others spoke about her previous interviews, where she criticized the original 1937 cartoon. She became public enemy number one. People hated her so much, in fact, that the film opened to poor box-office results in March 2025. Plenty of people blamed Zegler for that.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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