The Worst Acting Performances Of 2023

This year has seen no shortage of remarkable film performances, from towering mainstream turns like Lily Gladstone in "Killers of the Flower Moon" to unforgettable indie performances like Greta Lee in "Past Lives." Impressive work like this reminds us how remarkable actors can be, turning characters on the big screen into instantly captivating flesh-and-blood people. Of course, not every performance in 2023 has been something to write home about, and every year's movie landscape will inevitably feature some duds as well. The worst acting performances of 2023 are incredibly miscalculated efforts — for a variety of reasons — but they're also not emblematic of the actors' incompetence.

Instead, they're reflective of an assortment of flaws that don't just belong to the actors. This includes misdirection from filmmakers, conceptually egregious miscasting, scripts that never let performers engage in their best traits and so much more. These less-than-stellar performances of 2023 appear in a range of movies, from quiet sci-fi dramas to grand superhero films to faith-based features and everything in between. Across the eclectic range of cinema, though, these performances all share a similar level of subpar quality, making moviegoers appreciate the magnificent work found in better 2023 performances. Here are some of the worst acting performances of 2023. 

In 2019, Awkwafina impressed with her incredible work in "The Farewell." With this performance, it seemed like she had opened up new exciting doors for where she could go in her acting career. Unfortunately, the 2023 film "Renfield" is a tragic demonstration of Awkwafina failing to utilize her talents as well as she could. Playing the determined New Orleans cop Rebecca, her "Renfield" performance suffers from director Chris McKay's scattered approach to the entire movie's tone. While other filmmakers — like Sam Raimi — can effortlessly juggle gags and bloodshed, McKay struggles to balance broad jokes with grisly Dracula-based carnage.

As a byproduct of this problem, Awkwafina's performance as Rebecca is often quite frustrating, with the performer going too big in her more comedic scenes. However, she's also got a weirdly insincere quality in the supposedly tender moments when Rebecca is talking about, or to, her sister. She just doesn't click at all in "Renfield" and her performance represents the entire project's weird tonal issues. Unsurprisingly, major reviews for "Renfield" often highlighted Awkwafina as a key defect in the overall movie, with Variety calling her performance, "blunt and overstated."

Something went horribly wrong with Zachary Levi's interpretation of Billy Batson (aka Shazam) between the first two "Shazam!" movies. In "Shazam! Fury of the Gods," Levi constantly spews out modern slang words like "lit" and tosses out far too many clumsy one-liners, making his performance insufferable. It's also perplexing why the character is so much more aggressive this time, compared to his wacky — but certainly not abrasive — personality in the first "Shazam!" Worst of all, he doesn't seem capable of handling the heavier moments in the third act of "Fury of the Gods," where audiences have to be emotionally invested in his character's well-being. It's hard to worry about the safety of a man you've spent most of the film wishing would just shut up.

Levi's work as Shazam in this particular sequel is so obnoxiously loud that people can't ignore it. Major outlets like the Los Angeles Times highlighted Levi's performance as a critical weak link in a largely underwhelming sequel while fan reaction to the performance was so negative that Levi would address all the social media hate in interviews conducted months after the film's debut. Zachary Levi has been an entertaining performer elsewhere, but he's unbearable in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods."

For most of his career, Dennis Quaid worked with great filmmakers like Todd Haynes or Joe Dante. In recent years, though, Quaid has been content to do a barrage of sickly sweet "inspirational" dramas like "I Can Only Imagine" and "A Dog's Purpose." It's a disappointing career trajectory for an actor who once had the capacity to at least try new things. This frustrating path continues with his turn as Doug White in the faith-based drama "On a Wing and a Prayer." For this film, Quaid is mostly stuck inside a plane cockpit, a restrictive element that could've been an exciting challenge that brought out unexpected performance flourishes in other actors.

Instead, Quaid is on total autopilot here (no pun intended) with a lifeless performance that zaps any tension out of the film's airborne drama. Worse, his chemistry with Heather Graham who plays his wife, and Abigail Rhyne and Jessi Case who play his daughters, is terrible. "On a Wing and a Prayer" wants the familial bonds between Doug White and his loved ones to feel stronger than ever when the crisis hits, but Quaid never exhibits an iota of believability in his interactions with these people. Watching Quaid stiffly deliver tin-eared dialogue in this widely-lambasted performance, one can't help but grieve for the time in this man's career when he put effort into his performances.

In his extensive acting career, Ken Jeong has always been a scene-stealing supporting presence — "The Hangover" being just one example of many. However, his forays into leading man status have rarely gone very well. Some actors are just better in smaller doses rather than being the centerpiece of an entire TV show or movie. Case in point: Jeong's work as the scheming publicist Lenny in Charlie Day's feature-length directorial debut "Fool's Paradise." Nearly everything in "Fool's Paradise" goes completely off the rails (and not in a humorous way either), but Jeong's performance is an especially miscalculated creation. This actor is just the wrong kind of grating in his performance as a Hollywood hustler, especially since all of his annoying characteristics fail to be either funny or say something profound about the entertainment industry.

It's also bizarre that "Fool's Paradise" hinges key emotional moments around Jeong, such as a scene where Lenny bellows "But I'm a somebody!" while being thrown out of a party, a moment Day lingers on in a wide shot that keeps panning out as he keeps screaming the same phrase. There's no sense of palpable tragedy in this moment, just the sense that Jeong goes big to compensate for his inexperience with dramatic acting. Though Jeong proclaimed the film contains his best work as an actor, in the end, Jeong's performance was widely criticized alongside everything else in this comedic misfire.

Ben Affleck is capable of turning out interesting work as a performer, but he's also got an unfortunate track record for choosing truly baffling projects. One such film is the 2023 Robert Rodriguez movie "Hypnotic," which stars Affleck as Danny Rourke, a man who becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving evildoers who can maliciously utilize hypnosis. It's a bonkers premise for a film that does result in some amusingly hair-brained plot twists and clumsy dialogue, but it never quite takes off as the campy and ludicrous sci-fi schlock it could've been.

Part of the problem is Affleck, who is so stiff and lethargic in this role. A more committed dramatic performer — lending real weight and urgency to the nonsensical material — would've been entertaining, but Affleck's performance is shockingly devoid of any distinctive characteristics. As a result, Affleck is outshone by co-stars Alice Braga and William Fichtner. In the wake of the film's release, Affleck's performance was a frequent source of criticism in negative reviews of "Hypnotic," with many reviewers finding his presence in this baffling given his recent focus on adult dramas. Whatever informed Affleck's participation in "Hypnotic," his forgettable work marks another strange entry in his erratic filmography.

Halle Bailey's work as Ariel in "The Little Mermaid" may be the single best thing to emerge from the cursed trend of Disney live-action remakes. Bailey's fantastic performance — full of endearing dialogue-free acting and passionate song deliveries — is full of the kind of life that these perplexingly grounded remakes often lack. The only problem with Bailey's turn as Ariel is that her scenes opposite Javier Bardem's King Triton just reinforce the shortcomings of the latter. Bardem, an actor who was so compelling in films like "No Country for Old Men," is devoid of any energy in his portrayal of the king of the sea.

Part of the issue may be misdirection from director Rob Marshall, who may have told Bardem to play Triton as buttoned-up to represent a contrast between the man and his curious daughter. Whatever the reason, though, Bardem barely has a pulse throughout "The Little Mermaid" and his line deliveries are especially stilted. Coming hot off the heels of his over-the-top work in films like "Being the Ricardos" and "Lyle Lyle Crocodile," Bardem's lifeless King Triton is inexplicable. Bardem's rigidness as Triton is so glaringly obvious that it has been routinely pointed out in major reviews of "The Little Mermaid." Too bad that a film that delivered an enchanting lead turn from Halle Bailey couldn't also house a memorable Javier Bardem performance.

Every goofy shark movie needs its comic relief character. So it is with Page Kennedy in "Meg 2: the Trench," reprising his role as the wacky engineer, DJ, from the first film. The best comic relief characters tend to have some sort of larger function within the narratives of the films they inhabit — they can provide a clear purpose to fictional worlds even when they're not cracking one-liners. In the case of DJ, it's hard to see what he brings to the table when these characters are facing off against gigantic prehistoric beasties. Even worse, Kennedy's line deliveries and comedic timing are just not very good. Sequels tend to go bigger, but did "The Trench" also have to step up the scale of Kennedy's comedic antics?

Lengthy portions of "Meg 2: The Trench" are dedicated to wacky shenanigans with DJ — with a particularly lengthy bit involving his skills with a gun — and they're all made quite intolerable to sit through thanks to Kennedy's performance. He's clearly committed to the character, but that doesn't make him amusing. Instead, Kennedy's work on-screen registers as incredibly strained and an irritating, inescapable presence throughout the movie that viewers criticized for instilling a sense of tonal whiplash into the entire movie. Silly shark films tend to feature broad comic relief characters, but few of them are as grating as Page Kennedy in "Meg 2: The Trench."

Absurd comedy movies tend to be better when the actors in them play it straight. There's something so innately amusing about watching performers navigating the most ludicrous material while delivering a performance that would be right at home in a typical drama. In the case of the movie "Strays," one might imagine there'd be lots of comedic possibilities in having Doug, the abusive human owner of cute doggie Reggie (Will Ferrell), be played by an experienced dramatic actor. Such a performer playing off of raunchy canines would be hysterical, but instead, "Strays" opted to cast "Saturday Night Live" and "MacGruber" veteran Will Forte in the role.

While Forte is hysterical in other projects, in "Strays" he's too aggravatingly broad and never quite clicks as someone who can be genuinely intimidating to Reggie. The script for "Strays" puzzlingly plays out the idea of Reggie and Doug having an "abusive relationship" quite seriously, but Forte's performance undercuts these attempts at pathos. It doesn't help that Forte gets some of the most obvious dialogue in the entire feature, like his gratingly meta observation "It's like a talking dog movie in here!" upon being confronted by a group of canines. Forte's track record of scoring big laughs elsewhere wasn't enough to make him impervious to criticism in the negative reviews of "Strays," and it makes you wonder if they made the right choice in casting him for Doug.

"Dicks: The Musical" leading men Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson are basically inseparable in this raunchy riff on "The Parent Trap" as their characters Craig and Trevor, so why not count them as just one performance? That's especially handy since their pair of performances suffer from the same problems. The duo (who also wrote the movie) evoke classic over-the-top musical performances by being as intentionally obnoxious as possible ... yet nothing can shake how irritating these performances are. There are tons of other examples of loud and brash performances in comedy movies that are hysterical, so what went wrong here?

Part of the problem is that Sharp and Jackson lack finer nuances in their depiction of ramped-up heterosexual machismo. Compare their work here to the richly detailed performance of Andy Samberg as Conner4Real in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" and there's no question Sharp and Jackson are coasting on surface-level comedy. Plus, with the duo being so indistinguishable in their yelling, line deliveries, and personalities just feels like a wasted opportunity for comedy, not to mention a quality that makes "Dicks: The Musical" a quickly repetitive exercise. Once you hear these two screech out a punchline once, you've heard most of their style of comedy in "Dicks: The Musical." While there are amusing absurdist flourishes in "Dicks: The Musical," Sharp and Jackson's pair of subpar lead performances were a constant source of criticism from viewers.

Chances are, you've never heard of "She Came to Me." Dumped into theaters at the end of September 2023, this film features a series of divergent plotlines involving creatively stuck composer Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) and lovestruck teenager Teresa Szyskowski (Harlow Jane), who end up converging thanks to a technically illegal relationship between Steven's teenage son and Teresa. Much of the conflict emerges from court stenographer Trey Ruffa (Brian d'Arcy James), Teresa's extremely law-abiding father.

There are a lot of baffling choices in "She Came to Me," but the performance of Brian d'Arcy James is an especially miscalculated detail. The actor plays this man with all the ferocity of a Marvel movie supervillain, while Rebecca Miller's writing keeps emphasizing the character's eccentric quirks (like an obsession with Civil War reenactments) as though he's a character from a 2006 indie movie. This results in a disjointed performance that always feels like it wandered in from another movie — especially in the awkward moments between Trey and his wife Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) — while the one-note execution of Trey betrays the aims of "She Came to Me" to be a nuanced character study of ordinary flawed souls. Few have seen or really talked about "She Came to Me," but those who've witnessed the film have loudly proclaimed that the lackluster work Brian d'Arcy James is emblematic of the entire movie's flaws.

After exploding on people's radar following his work in the 2020 miniseries "Normal People," Paul Mescal is carving out a career most young actors would kill for. His outstanding work in the 2022 feature "Aftersun" cemented him as a titan in his generation of performers, though no actor has a truly blemish-free filmography. Case in point: Mescal's work in the 2023 Garth Davis directorial effort "Foe," in which the actor plays farmer Junior, an ordinary man informed he's been recruited to go and live in a space station. Major reviews for "Foe" bemoaned how this title wasted the talents of lead performers Mescal and Saoirse Ronan. And for good reason, as the movie undercuts their greatest qualities as performers, especially with regard to Mescal.

Tasked with performing with a stilted American accent that sounds like a bad Aaron Paul impression, Mescal is often directed to go incredibly big in his performance of Junior, including a lengthy monologue where he talks about the disgust at the degenerating health of his co-workers. In sharp contrast to Mescal's masterfully subtle and ambiguous work in "Aftersun," here the actor's grand displays of emotion just feel like a lot of noise in service of little substantive storytelling. Even in the quieter moments, Mescal feels off and not in a way that fits with the eerie ambiance "Foe" wants to create. This performance was widely considered a misfire for Paul Mescal, but thankfully, his work in "Foe" is still an anomaly in his larger filmography.