20 Great Movie Star Feuds & The Films That Spawned Them

This weekend sees the final episode of “Feud,” which stars Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange as Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, respectively, as they scheme and catfight their way through the filming of “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?” It also sees the second weekend of “The Fate Of The Furious,” the eighth ‘Fast And The Furious‘ film which stars Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, who reportedly fell out on set due to Diesel being a “candy ass” (Johnson’s words). Both have since apparently mended fences, with Diesel, who is also the film’s producer, kind of taking the high ground (after reportedly canning a post-credits scene that focussed on Johnson’s character to the exclusion of his) with a statement that is still quite the paternalistic humblebrag: “I’m the first multicultural megastar in Hollywood. They didn’t exist. To see another multicultural star come up is something I am very proud of. I’m always rooting Dwayne on,” he claimed, before going on, “It’s not always easy being an alpha. And it’s two alphas.”

READ MORE: ‘Feud’ Recreates The Drama Of The 1963 Academy Awards With Exquisite Style

Expect a further installment of this when they get the familia back together again for ‘The Fast and the FurioIX,” or when it’s being decided who’ll be played by Susan Sarandon and who’ll be Jessica Lange in the Ryan Murphy TV show based on the incident. Either way, it gave us the chance to take a break from our regular programming and explore the stories of on-set spats, tiffs, rows and argy-bargy between co-stars (we’re keeping directors out of it for the time being), and whether the films in question came off better or worse for the off-camera pyrotechnics.

Val Kilmer & Tom Sizemore in “Red Planet” (2000)
The turn of the 21st century was a strange time, a transitory period marked by end-of-the-millennium anxiety and a brief window in which both Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore were legitimate movie draws, but when the two eccentric, troubled stars teamed up on sci-fi picture “Red Planet” — a movie now best remembered as “the one that isn’t ‘Mission To Mars’” — things ended up coming to blows. The pair had been friends despite Sizemore’s on-and-off substance-abuse problems, having worked together on Michael Mann’s “Heat” five years earlier, but according to Sizemore’s memoirs, things kicked off on the Australian set of “Red Planet,” where Kilmer allegedly became upset that Sizemore’s gym equipment had been shipped to the Southern Hemisphere by the production, telling the character actor, “I’m making ten million on this; you’re only making two,” and causing Sizemore to throw a weight at him. Supposedly, producers knew a physical fight was inevitable and asked Sizemore not to hit Kilmer in the face; the actor complied. “I got into it with Val on the set and I told him ‘I’m never going to another planet with you again!’,” Sizemore would later tell the Daily Beast. “But we’re cool now and friends.”

Jim Carrey & Tommy Lee Jones in “Batman Forever” (1995)
It would perhaps not be wildly surprising to you that rubber-faced funnyman Jim Carrey, a man who had recently come to fame thanks to talking out of his butt in “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” and granite-faced character actor Tommy Lee Jones, a freshly minted Oscar winner for his supporting role in “The Fugitive,” would not be fast friends. In fact, it almost sounds like the pitch for a high-concept comedy that might have been made in the 1990s where the pair played mismatched buddy cops. Instead, they played the twin villains of Joel Schumacher’s day-glo nightmare of a Batman movie, “Batman Forever,” and to hear Carrey tell it recently, his chemistry with Jones went about as well as you’d expect. “I was really looking forward to working with Tommy,” Carrey, who was playing The Riddler to Jones’s Two-Face, told Howard Stern in 2014, “but he was a little crusty… I walked into a restaurant the night before our big scene in the Riddler’s lair. I went up to say hi and the blood drained from his face, in such a way that I realised that I had become the face of his pain. He got up, kind of shaking, hugged me, and said ‘I hate you, I really don’t like you.’” Carrey would speculate that Jones was sore that “Dumb And Dumber” had outgrossed Jones’ passion project “Cobb” on opening weekend, but Jones told Carrey another, and much more TLJ-ish, reason: “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” Ironically, Carrey gives a much better and more restrained performance than Jones in the film…

Wesley Snipes & Ryan Reynolds (and everyone) in “Blade: Trinity” (2004)
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of the original “Blade.” It was a film that helped make the vampire movie a big deal again (paving the way for everything from “Underworld” to “Twilight”), and it essentially birthed the modern superhero movie, two years ahead of “X-Men” and four ahead of “Spider-Man.” It even has a sequel that’s even better, in Guillermo del Toro’s “Blade II.” But by the time of the third movie, directed by series screenwriter David Goyer, things were going off the rails a bit. It’s a pretty bad film on a number of levels, but seemingly wasn’t helped by the behavior of star Wesley Snipes (who, two years later, would be charged with tax evasion and later convicted), who feuded with just about everyone during the making of the film. According to Patton Oswalt, who had a supporting role, Snipes “tried to strangle” Goyer after a misunderstanding led him to accuse Goyer of racism, eventually reaching the point where “he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes.” Then up-and-comer Ryan Reynolds, playing a sort of wisecracking proto-Deadpool character called Hannibal King, got the brunt of Snipes’ ire: according to a Spin set report, he referred to the actor as “that cracker… tell that cracker to get out of my eyeline, tell that cracker to get his lines right,” while villainess Parker Posey told the same source, “I’m just showing up, saying my lines, having fun with it. And Wesley isn’t.” He’d later sue the studio for his treatment during the movie, though the outcome isn’t clear.

William Baldwin & Sharon Stone in “Sliver” (1993)
Even by the standards of the brief erotic-thriller boom of the 1990s, “Sliver” is mostly forgotten (rightly so), but at the time it was a much-anticipated and deeply troubled production whose many issues included the palpable dislike between its two stars, the hot-off-“Basic Instinct” Sharon Stone and “Backdraft” breakout, and brother of Alec, William Baldwin. The film, which reteamed Stone with “Basic Instinct” writer Joe Eszterhas, had all kinds of issues, including fights between the studio and director Phillip Noyce, and a battle with the MPAA after an initial NC-17 rating that contributed to producer Robert Evans having a heart attack. But one of the most intrinsic was the immediate dislike that Stone and Baldwin appeared to take to each other. According to Entertainment Weekly, Baldwin ungentlemanly told a crew member after one love scene with Stone, “Thin lips, okay breath,” but she gave as good as she got. Eszterhas’s memoir “American Rhapsody” would later report that Stone disliked her co-star so much that she bit his tongue during a make-out scene, and apparently used mouthwash every time she kissed him. Despite the bad press and lousy reviews, the film eventually did ok, making $116 million worldwide.

Shia LaBeouf & Tom Hardy in “Lawless” (2012)
Among the current batch of leading men out there, Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy stand among the most…eccentric, and they’ve had friction with other colleagues in the past — LaBeouf has publicly feuded with, among others, Alec Baldwin, “Charlie Countryman” director Fredrik Bond (who he tried to strangle while taking acid), Oliver Stone and, uh, Soulja Boy; while Hardy clashed with Charlize Theron during the making of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” So it’s no surprise that when they starred in the same movie, John Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era moonshine crime drama “Lawless,” the pair almost literally butted heads. Seemingly in part because he felt left out by Hardy bonding with co-star Jessica Chastain (“He totally felt left out,” Chastain told MTV, with LaBeouf responding, “There was also this superiority with age and all that stuff”), there was a physical clash between the two stars. LaBeouf initially claimed to Details magazine that he was standing up to teasing and bullying from Hardy and that he knocked him out, saying his co-star “never did that roughhouse stuff with me again.” Hardy would later respond, possibly dryly, “He knocked me out sparko. Out cold. He’s a bad, bad boy. He is. He’s quite intimidating as well. He’s a scary dude…He just attacked me. He was drinking moonshine.” But later, Hillcoat, while confirming that the pair clashed, would deny that anyone was knocked out, posting on Reddit, “No, that’s not true. But there was definitely a fight between them. It escalated to the point where they had to both be restrained.” Somehow, this remains the most interesting thing about “Lawless.”