13 Acting Duos Who Had Great Onscreen Chemistry, But Reportedly Didn't Get Along IRL

13 Acting Duos Who Had Great Onscreen Chemistry, But Reportedly Didn't Get Along IRL,When an interviewer brought up the time her <i>A Change of Seasons</i> costar Anthony Hopkins called her "the most obnoxious actor" he ever worked with, Shirley MacLaine said, "I didn't like him either."

13 Acting Duos Who Had Great Onscreen Chemistry, But Reportedly Didn’t Get Along IRL

Some of the best onscreen romances are the result of the actors’ chemistry IRL. However, while some costars get along so well that they end up getting married, others hate working together so much that they were probably counting down the days until filming was over.

Here are 13 actors who hated working with their onscreen love interest:

1. Though they later went on to date for a few years after filming, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams didn’t get along while filming The Notebook. 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.'”

He 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.”

2. In the early days of The Vampire Diaries, Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley “didn’t get along.” On the podcast Directionally Challenged, she said, “I respected Paul Wesley, I didn’t like Paul Wesley. And I remember everyone would walk up to me after the show aired, and they’d be like, ‘Are you and Paul dating in real life?’ Because everyone thought that we had such good chemistry.”

She continued, “I realize now that there’s a fine line between love and hate, and we despised each other so much that it read as love but…we really just didn’t get along for maybe the first five months of shooting.”

3. 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.

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!”

4. 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.”

5. 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.”

6. 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!”

7. Kim Basinger told the New York Times that 9½ Weeks director Adrian Lyne didn’t want her and costar Mickey Rourke to meet up before filming started or to “have any relationship that would exclude him,” so Mickey rarely talked to her between scenes. The director also had him “rage at” and “frighten” her to elicit the emotions he wanted from her. The manipulation from both the director and her costar put Kim through a lot of emotional turmoil during filming.

She said, “Mickey was egging me on — I hated him sometimes. I got confused. I didn’t know who I was after a while. My husband and I had a bad time during this movie.”

8. 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.”

She continued, “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.”

9. In Unsinkable, her 2013 memoir, 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.”

Gene reportedly once said, “I wasn’t very nice to Debbie. I’m surprised she still speaks to me.”

10. 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.”

However, she added, “But he was on the wagon [abstaining from drinking alcohol] at that time, and it was hard on him.”

11. 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.”

Debra reportedly once called Richard a “brick wall costar.”

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.'”

12. Julia Roberts told the New York Times that Nick Nolte, her I Love Trouble costar, could be “completely charming and very nice” but was also “completely disgusting” and “seems [to] go out of his way to repel people.”

“From the moment I met him, we sort of gave each other a hard time, and naturally, we get on each other’s nerves,” she said.

In 2022, Nick told Insider, “No, I haven’t [reached out to her to try to bury the hatchet]. Though it’s buried. 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.”

13. And finally, 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, he later apologized for the way his comments came across, 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.”