Just like people working in any other industry, actors sometimes have to work with people who are difficult to get along with. Other times, they get along great with their costars off-set, but other factors like scary makeup and costumes, method acting techniques meant to evoke emotional reactions, or just the sheer intensity of acting can become too much to handle.
Here are 13 times directors and actors made their cast members or costars cry on set:
1. On Austin Bulter’s first day in the recording studio for Elvis, director Baz Luhrmann brought in a bunch of RCA execs, had them sit facing the actor, and instructed them to heckle him. Austin “went home in tears that night.”
He told VMAN, “[Then] when we were filming this moment when Elvis first goes on stage and he’s getting heckled by the audience, I knew what that felt like.”
She told British GQ, “He was hard on me, that’s for sure. It was a lot.. I was really just devastated on set.”
3. When Millie Bobby Brown first saw Vecna, the main villain in Strangers Things Season 4, she was so scared that she “burst into tears,” not realizing it was her costar Jamie Campbell Bower.
Jamie told Variety, “She wouldn’t look at me, and she was visibly just disgusted by the whole thing… After she cried and I made it obvious that she knew it was me, one of the things she said was that, ‘I knew it was you when I could smell cigarettes,’ because I’m a smoker.”
4. Hugh Grant told Elle that his Music and Lyrics costar Drew Barrymore “hates” him and that he “made her cry.”
On The Graham Norton Show, the host read the interview back to him. Hugh explained, “She made the mistake of giving me notes.”
5. While playing Pennywise in It, Bill Skarsgård “wasn’t very friendly or goofy.” When a group of child actor extras saw him in costume for the first time, some were intrigued, but some were so terrified they cried during the take.
He told Interview magazine, “I realized, ‘Holy shit. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.’ … But then we cut, and obviously, I was all, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. This is pretend.'”
6. The first day Burt Reynolds came to the Switching Channels set, he made Kathleen Turner cry because he “said something about not taking second place to a woman.”
She told Vulture, “Working with Burt Reynolds was terrible… His behavior was shocking. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t someone’s equal. I left the room sobbing. I called my husband and said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ He said, ‘You just do the job.’ It got to be very hostile because the crew began taking sides. But as for the performance, I was able to put the negativity aside. I’m not convinced Burt was.”
7. When Chloë Grace Moretz was 15, she worked with “one of the only actors that ever made [her] cry on set” — an unnamed actor in his mid-20s who told her, “I’d never date you in a real life… Yeah, you’re too big for me.”
She told Variety, “I went bawling to my brother, and he was like, ‘What happened?’ And I was like, ‘He told me I was too big.’ And my brother was like, ‘What just happened?’ My brother was so angry. I had to pick it up and go back on set and pretend he was a love interest, and it was really hard… It just makes you realize that there are some really bad people out there, and for some reason, he felt the need to say that to me. You have to kind of forgive and not forget really, but it was just like wow. It was jarring. I look back on it, and I was 15, which is really, really dark.”
8. During the dodgeball scene in Billy Madison, Adam Sandler was throwing balls at child actors when he accidentally hit one kid “pretty hard,” making him cry, which in turn made his parents upset.
On Conan, Adam said, “The parents all come up to me. ‘Hey, what’s the deal?’ And I say, ‘What do you mean? What happened?’ They’re like, ‘The kid. You nailed that kid.’ I go, ‘No, no, no, that’s the scene. I’m supposed to… I’m like a big guy [who] went back to school. I’m supposed to plug all these kids. It’s part of the joke.’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?… Did they read the script?’ They go, ‘They’re 6. They don’t read yet.'”
9. On Twitter, Elizabeth Aldrich, who was Lea Michele’s understudy in Ragtime on Broadway, alleged that she “used to cry every night from the mean and manipulative things [Lea] would do.” At the time, Elizabeth was 10, and Lea was 12.
Elizabeth also said, “She was absolutely awful to me and [the] ensemble. She demeaned the crew and threatened to have people fired if she was in any way displeased… She was terrifying.”
10. When then-11-year-old Gaby Hoffmann worked with lead actor/director Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face, he “just started cursing and screaming at” her because she was “acting like a kid instead of a professional actor.” He also made her cry on set.
She told HuffPost, “And the other [director who didn’t really like me] was Mel Gibson, and I think we can all agree that’s going to be tough for anybody. He screamed at me. Oh, God, he really screamed at me.”
11. Then-6-year-old Ellen Latzen struggled to cry on cue during scenes where her character’s parents were fighting in Fatal Attraction. She told the New York Times, “I was instructed not to speak. I was standing there with Uni, my own stuffed animal. Michael [Douglas] came up to me and said, ‘Look at that stupid unicorn. I’m going to throw it in the garbage.’ As you watch the scene, you can see I’m trying really hard to fight back tears. Finally, he was just yelling at me. I couldn’t hold it in anymore.”
She continued, “Adrian [Lyne, the director] said, ‘Cut!’ Immediately, Michael ran to me and held me, and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ It was pretty intense.”
Michael added, “I felt pretty guilty. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
12. According to a Vanity Fair profile of Meryl Streep that largely discussed her work with Dustin Hoffman on Kramer vs. Kramer, before filming a scene where Justin Henry, a child actor, had to cry, Dustin made him burst into real tears by telling him that he’d likely never see the crew members he’d grown close to again.
He continued to exploit Justin’s emotional vulnerabilities throughout filming in order to elicit the performance he wanted. For example, he’d tell him to think about losing his dog before they shot serious scenes.
13. And finally, during a Harry Potter scene where his character lost a loved one, then-15-year-old Daniel Radcliffe struggled to put himself in Harry’s shoes. To help him learn to act “bereaved,” his costar Gary Oldman “shook” and “screamed at” him.
Daniel told MTV News, “It’s kind of hard to find that level when you’re 15. But he came up to me and said, ‘Do you mind if we get a bit intense?’ And then he came toward me. I thought he was going to hold me, but he shook me and screamed at me! So hard that when he let me go, I almost fell. I wanted to go crawl up in a fetal position. And then he said, ‘Throw your head back and scream.’ And it worked.”
