Actors who slum it

Actors are an insecure lot. Even the most successful amongst them obsess about where the next paycheck is coming from. It stems from their days working as waiters, bartenders, cab drivers, dog walkers and various other unsung occupations while waiting for the phone to ring about that commercial audition or that one-line walk-on role on a soap.

Actors live with the constant fear that permanent unemployment is just around the corner, which is why they are more likely than most to take jobs that are beneath their talents. Sometimes they take a role strictly for the money. Sometimes they take a role because they just want to remain in the public eye, even if it involves wallowing in trash. Often it’s both.

But it’s particularly unsettling when we come across a distinguished actor slumming for the dough, especially when it’s somebody who has brought us a great deal of enjoyment over the years because of their wealth of talent and their large reservoir of integrity. It’s a hard reality for us cinephiles to accept, even though logic tells us that banks foreclose on mansions, too, so the fat paycheck for appearing in dreck is sometimes a necessary evil.

The following is a list of 10 such thespians and films that we hope brought them boatloads of money, since they also brought a considerable amount of embarrassment. The topic is inspired by Bill Murray, who can be heard as the voice of Garfield in “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.” Alas, Bill didn’t make the final 10, since his was only a voiceover effort. Let’s pray he got paid handsomely anyway:

Robert De Niro, in “Showtime” — Bobby D. is quite a contradiction. Although he is one of our greatest living actors and has appeared in such cinematic classics as “Taxi Driver,” “The Godfather, Part II” and “Goodfellas,” he also has made more stinkers in recent years than any of his illustrious peers. Some of the more notorious titles that were considered here include “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle,” “15 Minutes,” “Flawless” and “The Fan.” But “Showtime” is particularly painful to watch. It’s supposed to be a semi-spoof of a buddy-cop picture pairing DeNiro and Eddie Murphy that purports to provide a wickedly funny and insightful look at our obsession with media and reality TV, but it just sinks from the sheer weight of its leaden jokes. Bobby D. can do comedy — he was superb in “Midnight Run” — but he couldn’t make this funny if he pumped laughing gas into theaters.

Meryl Steep in “She-Devil” — If you look over Meryl’s credits, you’ll see that she usually makes artistic choices that are worthy of her lofty standing in Hollywood, although check back with me on that after “The Devil Wears Prada” comes out. “She-Devil” was a terrible miscalculation. The guess here is that somebody in her family needed an operation, or she spotted a place in Aspen she just had to have. All you really need to know about “She-Devil” is that Meryl’s co-star is Roseanne Barr. The story is about a fat woman named Ruth (Barr) who becomes jealous when a romance novelist (Streep) gets involved with her husband and then plots revenge. Streep’s work is always excellent, and it is here as well. But she should have worked somewhere else. Her part should have gone to someone like Brett Butler or Katey Sagal.

Ava Gerlitz / AP

Samuel L. Jackson in “The Man” — Now I love Sam, as we all do. He can take toxic waste and make it seem palatable. “Snakes On A Plane” would probably be met with venom without him. “The Man” is an action comedy that pairs Jackson with Eugene Levy in a story about a federal agent who searches for the man who killed his partner but, in a non-hilarious case of mistaken identity, gets tangled up with a goofball. It’s a sad commentary whenever an accomplished performer like Jackson appears in a film that involves fart jokes, but it’s even worse when the fart jokes are the highlights. The running time for “The Man” is 83 minutes, which coincidentally is also about as long as it lasted in theaters.

Marlon Brando in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” — Most of the choices on this list involve actors who are currently working; an “all-time” list would have been unwieldy. But a posthumous nod has to go to the magnificent Marlon, who had long before ascended to the presidency of the Clean Your Plate Club by the time he made this unintentionally campy version of the H.G. Wells story about a mad doctor on an island who experiments with DNA and changes animals into odd humans. It should be noted that just about every job Marlon took after “Last Tango In Paris” in 1972 he did for the paycheck. But this was a particularly egregious example, and it only served to answer critics who wondered what happened to the strapping beast who electrified the stage and screen years before in “A Streetcar Named Desire”: He ate him.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Halle Berry in “Catwoman” — Most actors want to be taken seriously. Berry established her acting chops with her work in the TV movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” and later “Monster’s Ball,” for which she won an Academy Award. But the lure of franchise riches proved to be too great. She suited up in black latex to play Catwoman, which on the surface doesn’t sound like a bad idea. I have to assume she was too busy reading real estate brochures or poring over a Porsche owner’s manual to peruse the script, assuming there was one. “Catwoman” was roundly hissed by critics and audiences alike, and it earned her a Worst Actress Razzie. This picture was such a pool of lifeless sludge that even she called it a “piece of s---, godawful movie,” although she later said she’s open to doing a sequel. Go figure.

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