Hostility On The Set / Live-Action TV

• 24:
  • At a Comic-Con panel, Freddie Prinze Jr. revealed that he hated working on the show and with Kiefer Sutherland so much that he almost quit acting altogether and mostly does voice work nowadays.
    I did 24; it was terrible. I hated every moment of it. Kiefer was the most unprofessional dude in the world. That's not me talking trash, I'd say it to his face. I think everyone that's worked with him has said that. I just wanted to quit the business after that. So, I just sort of stopped.
  • Shohreh Aghdashloo, who played Dina Araz in the fourth season, also admitted to having difficulties with working with Sutherland. Aghdashloo has gone on record that she suspects one reason Dina was killed off was because of Sutherland's interference.
• ABC experienced tension on its news side over who would be the one to lead coverage of breaking news and major events. Traditionally, this would be a role assumed by the evening news anchor, in ABC's case, David Muir. However, ABC relied on George Stephanopoulos to fill this role. Muir bristled at being denied the responsibilities that anchors at other networks received. The network tried to ease tensions by naming both men co-lead news anchors and giving Stephanopoulos lead coverage for news that happened before 6pm and Muir lead coverage for news that happened afterward. This satisfied neither of them. Because ABC didn't want to lose either man, each a proven audience draw, the network decided to make Muir the sole lead news anchor while Stephanopoulos was given guaranteed primetime slots for specials he can develop at his own pleasure.
• ALF: The difficulties in working both on a set with multiple open trap doors to accommodate a puppet and puppeteer, and with a puppeteer whose perfectionism led to most episodes taking longer than usual to film for a sitcom of that era, led most of the human cast to deeply resent having to play second fiddle to a puppet and sometimes lash out over it at whoever was convenient. "We're all puppets here!", Max Wright said at one point. In fact, one of the show's most infamous stories is that Wright was apparently so miserable, the moment the final shooting session was done, he made a bee-line to his car and drove off, not speaking a word to anyone.
• During Alice, Linda Lavin was reported as being difficult to work with and was jealous of Polly Holliday's popularity as Flo. Even after Holliday left and her Spin-Off, Flo, ended after one season, she refused to make any guest appearances. Her replacement Diane Ladd also had difficulties with Lavin and cited that as the reason she left the series after only a year.
• All That:
  • Katrina Johnson recalls being told that she was "getting too fat" and that, "You can't be the fat one." because they already have a "fat one" (most likely referring to Lori Beth Denberg).
  • Angelique Bates, a cast member during the show's first two seasons, spoke out about bad experiences on and off set during her time on the show. All cast members were provided housing in a complex near Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando. Her mother was abusing her, verbally and physically, and her neighboring castmates could occasionally hear it going on. The physical abuse became known amongst the cast when Kel Mitchell's sister did Angelique's nails one day, only to notice them destroyed the next. Nickelodeon forced Angelique to be quiet about the abuse to avoid ruining the show or network's image. She also recalled verbal abuse from Dan Schneider, who screamed at her in front of everyone and made her cry over something that was later proven to not be her fault. Angelique claims the set environment in general was misogynistic, as the male cast members were favored over the females, and the one female writer on the show, Kayla Alpert, was fired after only two episodes. Schneider reportedly told Angelique to lessen her comedic acting to avoid overshadowing her male costars. Because of this, along with Angelique's mother rejecting unwanted advances from male crew members, Angelique was given less screentime and dialogue in Season 2.
  • Bryan Hearne, who is black, recalls being fitted for a skin-colored bodysuit to play a fetus, and hearing someone on set refer to his skin color as "charcoal". Fellow black cast member Giovonnie Samuels also recalls being shown less regard than the white cast members.
• 'Allo 'Allo!:
  • Rose Hill and Jack Haig had a sparky on-set relationship. On one occasion, when Hill had taken too long to deliver her next line, Haig muttered, "I could've eaten a bloody ham sandwich in that pause".
  • Haig also had a conflict with the make-up department, claiming that after fifty years of doing his makeup, he didn't need "some girl who had only been in the business five minutes".
• The Amanda Show:
  • When Raquel Lee celebrated her 13th birthday on set, she recalls Dan Schneider being angry over her birthday cake being "too big", and showing less regard to her than her white co-stars.
  • Writers Christy Stratton and Jenny Kilgen, the only two female writers on the show, recall Schneider making sexist comments right in front of them, such as challenging them to "name one funny female writer". Stratton was once egged on by Dan to mime being sodomized on a table while telling a story, much to her humiliation. Both writers were also told by Schneider that the surname of the character Penelope Taynt was intended to be a sexual reference (on a children's show) and not to tell anyone. Schneider also had both women split the salary for one writer, something none of the male writers had to do. Kilgen went to the Writers Guild of America and asked if such a thing was allowed, which it was not. The WGA then investigated Schneider and forced him to pay both women full salaries, after which Schneider told Kilgen that if he finds out she was responsible for this, "You will never work for Nickelodeon again."
  • After Season 1, Stratton was let go while Kilgen remained, but Schneider told her she would be paid on a 16-week contract despite Season 2 being scheduled for 27 weeks of production, meaning she would have to work 11 weeks for free. After just four episodes of Season 2, Schenider called Kilgen into his office with all the male writers, and asked her out of nowhere, in front of everyone, "Didn't you used to do phone sex?" (she did not). Humiliated, Kilgen quit the show and sued Schneider for gender discrimination.
• American Idol's first two seasons had Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul, who openly admit that they genuinely despised each other both on and off camera. According to both, however, by the third season something had "clicked" for them, and they became very close friends (though the arguing didn't go anywhere). Simon says that while making true friends is rare in show business, he and Paula genuinely are.
• The August 22, 2017 edition of America's Got Talent had a live version of this: After Simon Cowell made a passing remark about fellow judge Mel B's ongoing divorce, the rapper saw it as an insensitve comment and threw a glass of water at Simon's face before leaving the judges' table. Apparently, since Simon had joined the show the year before, tensions between the two had grown, leading to several confrontations between them.
• Angel Street credited its short run in part to the hostility between leads Robin Givens and Pamela Gidley.
• While they stayed good friends and always kept things professional, Mollie Sugden and John Inman would clash over who got top billing as Are You Being Served? went on, as both believed themselves to be the star of the show.
• Arrowverse:
  • Arrow: Showrunner Mark Guggenheim is infamous for causing tension on set because he has a history of making creative decisions without warning the actors involved. In particular, Katie Cassidy and John Barrowman were not informed their characters were being killed off until only a few days before their death scenes were shot. For Cassidy, this led to most of the cast of Arrow and even some of The Flash (2014) publicly deriding the decision, as well as Cassidy revealing that she could blatantly see how much Guggenheim and the writing staff have had it out for her character since day one.^note Cassidy started the show as the lead female and second-billed in the cast, and increasingly slid down the depth chart after Season 1 For Barrowman, who had actually just negotiated his contract so he could reappear in any the next year's shows, this led to him finishing his role, telling the producers "where they could shove it", and then exiting the franchise almost completely.^note He returned for the Elseworlds crossover for a grand total of two scenes He has even gone on record saying that he believed the only reason why Malcolm's body was never shown was just as a way to protect himself from the backlash.
  • Batwoman (2019):
    • In an Instagram post in October 2021, Ruby Rose said that she left the show at the end of the first season due to her extremely fractured relationship with the producers and Showrunners over the terrible working conditions the crew were in. She said that horrific injuries went ignored, including that she was forced to go back to work only ten days after an injury which nearly left her paralyzed, and accused showrunner Caroline Dries of "having no heart" and trying to force the crew to keep shooting even during the COVID-19 Pandemic (at least until lockdowns made production infeasible). She also spoke about her extremely poor relationship with Dougray Scott, who she claimed was volatile and abusive to crew members and called him a "nightmare", and Camrus Johnson, who she called an "egomaniac kid", and said that WB chairman Peter Roth sexually harassed female employees and hired a private investigator to snoop on her (and then fired the investigator when his report didn't say what he was hoping it would say about Rose). She said she'd never return to the show no matter how much money they offered her.
    • However, it was implied in this article released after Ruby Rose's departure that she was the source of hostility on set. A source close to the show claims that Rose was "wasn't happy working on the show, and did that make her fun to work with? No." It's also been alleged that she wasn't prepared at all for the long working hours that came with being a lead star of a TV show on top of the movies she was doing, which made her pretty irritable at times. In response to Rose's own claims, a production assistant went on record reaffirming the original claims, and added that Rose treated everyone badly on set, didn't have her lines memorised before arriving on set, and frequently arrived late. Scott denied her allegations, and Johnson reiterated that she was fired and didn't leave the project of her own volition.
    • During a roundtable discussion with Azie Tesfai (from Supergirl), Candice Patton (from The Flash) and Anna Diop (from Titans), Javicia Leslie talked frankly about having to deal with racist harassment from fans and how frustrated she was that her co-stars were not supporting her. Candice later detailed similar experiences on an episode of The Open Up Podcast in 2022.
• The A-Team:
  • Mr. T and George Peppard didn't get along very well on the set. Arguments were fed by the fact that Mr. T became the real star of the show despite Peppard's being a "proper movie actor". Things got even worse when Peppard learned that Mr. T was paid more than he was. It got so bad that Peppard wouldn't even speak to Mr. T directly, using Dirk Benedict to relay messages between the two. It was reported that they were able to patch up things before Peppard's death in 1994.
  • Dwight Schultz recalled that when he first met Peppard, he introduced himself, then the veteran actor replied, "Very good. I'm George Peppard and I am not a nice man."
  • Peppard made it clear to both Melinda Culea and Marla Heasley that he didn't want their characters on the show. On Heasley's first day on set Peppard took her aside and told her "We don't want you on the show. None of the guys want you here. The only reason you're here is because the network and the producers want you. For some reason they think they need a girl." Ironically or not, on her last day of work Peppard took her aside again, saying: "I'm sorry that this is your last day, but remember what I said the very first day, that we didn't want a girl, has nothing to do with you. You were very professional, but no reason to have a girl." While the other male actors weren't as hostile towards Culea or Heasley as Peppard was, they ended up siding with him on the issue, with Dirk Benedict later remarking...
    It was a guy's show. It was male-driven. It was written by guys.^note Babs Greyhosky begs to differ. It was directed by guys. It was acted by guys. It's about what guys do. We talked the way guys talked. We were the boss. We were the God. We smoked when we wanted. We shot guns when we wanted. We kissed the girls and made them cry ... when we wanted. It was the last truly masculine show.
  • Culea was also reputed to be difficult on-set, often demanding more action-based roles. This led to the producers unceremoniously dropping the character, unlike Heasley, whose character was at least given a proper exit. According to the Reunion special, Peppard commended Heasley on her last day, praising her professional attitude.
  • Even though he was hired specifically because it was thought his friendship with Peppard and his offscreen affability would help get Peppard and Mr. T back on the same page, Robert Vaughn stated in a late career interview that Peppard had warned him that T was "crazy". Vaughn thought that Peppard was exaggerating at first, but stated "Mr. T would come in to work at 7AM with his entourage and he would be talking (Vaughn then did an impression of a motor mouthed Mr. T) and then when we would finish the day's shoot at 7PM or later, he was STILL talking. I think he was clinically insane". While Vaughn didn't actively dislike T, it was clear that he grated on his nerves.
• The Avengers (1960s):
  • Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman had a disagreement, at about the time she left the series. According to the book written by Macnee about the series, he became verbally abusive toward Blackman while drunk. The reason for their argument was due to disagreeing over the organizing of security staff for a party which the studio was hosting.
  • While she got on well with Macnee, Diana Rigg evidently didn't have a very enjoyable time on the show, which likely led to her leaving after only two seasons. One of her complaints was the pay disparity between her and Macnee (she was initially getting paid less than the show's cameraman); she has commented that her demanding more equality resulted her being slagged in the press at the time.
• Babylon 5: Troubled Production doesn't begin to describe it...
  • The first and most famous one is Jerry Doyle's (Michael Garibaldi) hatred of Michael O'Hare (Jeffrey Sinclair). Doyle found O'Hare's frequent outbursts and tendency to go off on strange tangents prima-donnalike and even referred to him as "the whackjob" in interviews. When O'Hare left the series after season one, Doyle threatened to "kick the whackjob's ass" if they ever set foot in the same room again, and, true to form, they never appeared on screen together again. A lot of this became Harsher in Hindsight when it was revealed after O'Hare's death that he had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for the entirety of the recording, that a lot of his strange behavior was due to his inability to separate reality and imagination, and that he had been holding the shreds of his sanity together on willpower alone to ensure that the rest of the cast would have a job to go to.
  • Jerry Doyle was also married to actress Andrea Thompson (Talia Winters), during Season 1, but between seasons one and two, the couple went through an extremely bitter and acrimonious divorce. The set afterwards was something of a minefield.
  • J. Michael Straczynski and Claudia Christian fell out in atomic fashion, which led to Christian leaving the series before shooting on Season 5 began. If you ask Straczynski, Christian was trying to use her status as one of the key actors on the show and threatening to walk off the set to leverage an utterly outrageous pay-raise and he called her on it. If you ask Christian, she was fired for refusing a sexual advance from Straczynski. Neither party was willing to talk to the other, instead taking to the early fan forums on Usenet to rile up the fanbase against the other. As of 2020, Christian and Straczynski have not spoken in over 25 years, and the feud both between the creators and within the fandom continues with unabated fury.
• Barney Miller had a mostly happy set ... except years later, Hal Linden (Barney) revealed that he and Gregory Sierra (Chano) simply did not get along at all on a personal level. You'd be hard-pressed to tell by their performances, though, as the two men did not let their personal issues affect their on-screen work. After two seasons, Sierra took the lead in another series created by Danny Arnold (A.E.S. Hudson Street) ... but when that series crashed and burned after six episodes, Sierra was never invited back to Barney Miller, which continued for another six years.
• Batman:
  • Adam West described Neil Hamilton, who played Commissioner Gordon, as somewhat difficult to work with, due to him taking his work very seriously, even on a silly show like this.
  • Otto Preminger, best known as a director but also played Mr. Freeze in a two-parter, was known for being difficult to work with as both an actor and director. West commented that, when the time came for him to pick up Freeze's unconscious body, Preminger wouldn't offer any subtle assistance, forcing West to pick up dead weight. It's no surprise that Freeze was recast for his next appearance.
• Best of Friends (1963) was cancelled after one series due to the offstage tensions between Charles Hawtrey and Hylda Baker being seen as not worth the trouble of making any more episodes.
• Shannen Doherty's clashes with her co-stars on Beverly Hills, 90210 led to her departure at the end of the fourth season. When she moved on to Charmed (which experienced very similar turbulence and departure), Luke Perry reportedly said, "It's appropriate that she's playing a witch in her current show." she eventually made up with the cast enough to be included in the 2019 meta reboot. Best of all, Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty began a new friendship where they had learned their lesson and promised to never make the same mistakes again.
• The Brady Bunch:
  • Robert Reed hated starring on such a "silly" show and constantly butted heads with creator Sherwood Schwartz, often having temper tantrums on set and sending memos criticizing the writing over matters as small as whether strawberries give off a smell when cooked. There were some episodes that Reed outright refused to participate in for being too absurd for his tastes, including the show's final episode "The Hair-Brained Scheme". As a result, Mike Brady was said to be "out of town" for Greg's graduation. Schwartz later stated that he had planned to drop Mike for Season 6 had the show not been cancelled. Despite his problems with Schwartz, Reed got along very well with the kids on the show, and often bonded with them off-screen; he and Florence Henderson were also good friends.^note In early 1992, as Reed was dying, he called Henderson and asked her to inform "the kids" of his condition on his behalf, which she did. He also reprised his role as Mike Brady in all Brady sequel series and TV movies. (Yes, even The Brady Bunch (Variety) Hour. The complete lack of Sherwood Schwartz involvement there may have helped - it was a co-production between Paramount Television and Sid and Marty Krofft Productions!)
  • Echoing their characters' occasional squabbles, Eve Plumb (Jan) did not care to be around Maureen McCormick (Marcia) for many years. Depending on who you ask, they didn't care for each other even when the original show was in production. Maureen claims they were "best friends" during the show, while Eve stated that she didn't consider Maureen more than an acquaintance, and it is rumored that Jan's frequent animosity and jealousy of Marcia was genuine emotion from Eve. In the 1990's, after the cancellation of the final Brady series, The Bradys (in which Maureen declined to participate), Eve dyed her hair brown to distance herself from the Jan character and the Brady franchise as a whole, and was the only surviving cast member to decline making a cameo appearance in The Brady Bunch Movie (although half of the others' cameos didn't make the final cut, including Maureen's). What really set off the rivalry between the two TV sisters was an appearance by Maureen on the 1997 talk show Vibe, where she mentioned kissing all of the other cast members, including Eve, which took the host by surprise. This resulted in the media spinning her comment into stories of the two girls having a lesbian affair while doing the show. Eve was furious and refused to speak to Maureen for years, especially after she decided to go along with the lesbian rumor and use it to promote her autobiography. Eve rarely participated in Brady reunions, and some were outright cancelled due to Eve being the only one to decline. When she did participate, she was never seated near Maureen, or the latter was not present at all. Susan Olsen (Cindy) commented that she hates being a middlewoman between the two, having maintained friendships with both of them, but sympathizes with Eve and respects her decision to move on from Jan. Eve would later embrace her time on The Brady Bunch more openly after the surviving cast reunited for A Very Brady Renovation in 2019, the first time in 15 years all six Brady kids had been in the same room. When asked about Maureen, Eve denied any feud and said there was "no remedy needed". Christopher Knight (Peter) stated that any tension between the girls "was soon dissipated".
• Buffyverse:
  • Reports had come out in the years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended regarding backstage tension and difficulties between producers, cast, and crew. This came to a breaking point in 2021 with numerous cast members acknowledging the issue, which lead to an in-depth expose by Adam B. Vary and Elizabeth Wagmeister for Variety, who stated, "The series was set at a California high school beset by vampires, demons and toxic mean girls, but it turns out its real-life Big Bad was the show’s creator, Joss Whedon." The general opinion of Whedon was that he was a talented Showrunner who collaborated well, but also a tyrant who forged a Cult of Personality around himself that only grew as he became a geek icon seen as the driving force behind the success of Buffy. Between Whedon's inexperience running a TV show, the low-budget show's heavy reliance on special effects, the long hours, the young cast, and the lack of supervision by the studio, the atmosphere on the set of Buffy quickly turned into something resembling its High School setting, with Whedon as its Alpha Bitch: treating his inner circle well and regarding them as True Companions, and everybody else like dirt and subjecting them to bullying and scorn. As such, many people have horror stories about the production of both Buffy and Angel.
  • James Marsters has stated that Whedon reacted very negatively to Spike's Ensemble Dark Horse status. He envisioned the show's vampires purely as Always Chaotic Evil villains, and the audience reaction to Spike caused him to lash out in anger at Marsters.
  • Few had as miserable a time working on Buffy and Angel as Charisma Carpenter. In 2021, she went public with long-rumored allegations surrounding her time on Buffy and Angel, which inspired the Variety article. She said that Whedon played favorites with actors on set and pit them against each other to win his approval, that she was overworked to the point where it caused her physical harm, and that she only stayed on for the steady paycheck, all while justifying his behavior in her mind because she didn't want to admit she was being harassed. The Variety article notes she was a network-mandated hire, which grated on Whedon, who wanted complete control and would be dismissive of her performance. Whedon in turn was frustrated by Carpenter's tardiness. She also suffered from anxiety which caused her to struggle with her lines and marks, which frustrated Whedon, who was obsessed with word-perfect dialogue. Long before this was revealed, it was known that her pregnancy in the fourth season of Angel caused a lot of friction between her and Whedon, but he seemed to take the reveal personally (suggesting she get an abortion), which ended with Cordelia being written out of the fifth season in a manner that left a lot of bad blood, not least because Carpenter only found out from the press. She was eventually brought back for the fifth-season episode "You're Welcome", only for Cordelia to be Killed Off for Real after Whedon promised her he wouldn't do so. By her account, Carpenter was in tears when she realized how she was being written out of the show. In 2022, she referred to him as her "former tyrannical, narcissistic boss who is still unable to be accountable or just apologize". Sarah Michelle Gellar, Michelle Trachtenberg, Marsters, Amber Benson (who described the onset atmosphere as toxic), Nicholas Brendon, Anthony Head, David Boreanaz, Eliza Dushku, Emma Caulfield, Julie Benz, Clare Kramer, Adam Busch, Danny Strong, Tom Lenk, Jonathan M. Woodward and James C. Leary either backed up her claims and/or lent their support.
  • Michelle Trachtenberg's mother was horrified by some of the raunchy jokes that were regularly thrown around backstage. Reportedly, this hit the teenage Michelle herself, who later accused Whedon of inappropriate behavior; while she didn't go into detail, she claimed that he wasn't allowed to be alone in a room with her after an exchange that several crew members believed crossed a line. Although Whedon would later deny that such a rule existed, interviews with the show's crew confirmed that it did, but was not so much a rule forbidding Whedon from one-on-one alone time with her as it was a guideline that she was not to be left alone with him, which Whedon may not have actually been informed about.
  • In 2017, Whedon's ex-wife Kai Cole wrote an open letter accusing him of having had several affairs throughout their marriage, including with women he worked with on his shows. Some of the sources in the Variety article corroborated Cole's claims that Whedon was having affairs with female employees. Eventually, in a now-infamous interview with Vulture, Whedon admitted to the affairs bizarrely claiming that he felt he "had" to do them.
  • Buffy's stunt coordinator/second unit director Jeff Pruitt and Gellar's Stunt Double (and Pruitt's wife) Sophia Crawford feuded with both Whedon and Gellar, which contributed to their departure. They have said that Whedon let the show's growing popularity and critical acclaim go to his head, and that, while he started the show as a humble guy who regularly turned to Pruitt for help shooting fight scenes, he eventually let fame go to his head and turned into an egomaniac. The last straw was when Whedon demanded that Pruitt and Crawford end their romance if they wanted to keep working on the show. Pruitt also claimed that the production had installed a keylogger on his computer, allowing the producers access to all of his emails. As for Gellar, Pruitt wrote a short fantasy story that was a thinly-veiled Roman à Clef of his and Sophia's feelings regarding working with her, and while he would later disown it and be more diplomatic regarding her later on, saying that she'd mellowed out since, he still believes that, back then, Gellar had a tendency to Wag the Director with the way scenes were shot and that she had grown jealous of Crawford during the third season. Whedon, for his part, countered that Pruitt and Crawford weren't blameless in their departure, and that Pruitt had an ego of his own, seeing himself "as a noble knight being plotted against by evil courtiers, [which] really doesn't help."
  • Alyson Hannigan, once close friends with Gellar, was not on speaking terms with her by the time the show wrapped. In a post-series interview, she blamed her for putting her out of a job without any warning (Gellar chose to end the show after the seventh season through an announcement in Entertainment Weekly), and said that Gellar was getting sick of working on the show as early as the third season, though she was quick to praise Gellar's work ethic. However, time (and mutual parenthood) seems to heal all wounds, and the evidence indicates that Hannigan and Gellar are friends again.
  • Darla was reportedly written out of the first season more quickly than intended because of conflict between Julie Benz and the regular cast members, especially Hannigan, who claimed that Benz was mean to her. Fortunately, she later mellowed out enough for Whedon to bring her back for a couple of guest spots, and eventually a recurring role on Angel. By the 2000s, Benz and Hannigan had patched things up and could be seen exchanging pleasantries on Twitter.
  • While Emma Caulfield has never named names, she has said that, by Season 7, she felt "very unappreciated" and "continually disrespected" by certain people involved with the show, and that they had made her experience working on Buffy miserable. She reportedly requested that Anya be killed off so she could not be used on any future shows.
  • According to Caulfield, Nicholas Brendon and David Boreanaz never really got along. For the twentieth anniversary reunion, Boreanaz reportedly had Brendon blocked from the photoshoot, possibly due to his substance abuse issues (he was inserted in later). It's worth noting that Boreanaz was close friends with his late Angel co-star Glenn Quinn, who had a drug problem that resulted in his premature death.
  • Season 6 is arguably the show's most divisive season, and few people were as open and vocal about that as Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. Her grievances? Where to begin? For starters, she was very unhappy about the Channel Hop from The WB to UPN, eliminating the chances for crossovers with Angel. She was also quite upset about the decision to pair Buffy and Spike in a mutually destructive relationship (Gellar is an outspoken Buffy/Angel shipper, calling them "soul mates"), and the graphic sexual nature of their scenes made her very uncomfortable (she's reported to have said "If I wanted to do porn, I'd do porn!"), finding it disrespectful to her and her character. Finally, she felt that the dark and depressing nature of the season was out of tone with the show and that the Buffy she was playing was unrecognisable from the one she and the fans knew and loved. With Whedon largely hands-off this season to work on the third season of Angel and Firefly, she felt that she had nobody to vent her complaints to. It reportedly got so bad that she almost quit the series after this season, but ultimately stayed on for a final season, with a few conditions, among them Whedon returning as Show Runner and a significantly Lighter and Softer tone. Gellar would later describe the set as an "extremely toxic" environment in which the female stars were routinely pitted against each other by the men in charge, and said that "[w]hile I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon."
  • In an interview for the book Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born, Amber Benson stated that she was having issues with somebody on the show that were coming to a head just as her character Tara left, and that, despite many fan requests to bring Tara back (including Whedon reaching out to her personally), she refused to return to the show because it would've meant interacting with them again. Benson also disputes that there was any serious intention for Tara to return, as she was only offered the First Evil for season seven.
• Castle: There were plenty of rumors that there were serious problems between Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion starting from around Season 4. They'd done joint appearances until Season 3. They apparently couldn't be in the same room together for too long and shot scenes together only when they absolutely had to, resulting in Castle and Beckett starting to have separate storylines. The tensions reportedly reached a point where lines were being drawn within the cast. These were going to result in Katic's departure from the show, had it not been cancelled. A series finale was therefore hastily cobbled together. She claims that it came from the pay discrepancy between the two of them. She says she understands why he made a lot more money than her at the beginning because he was the established name and she was the unknown actor. However, she felt that as time went on the gap should have closed and she felt like the network was helping him at her expense. He's never commented on the issue.
• Charlie's Angels:
  • Kate Jackson and Cheryl Ladd reportedly did not get along during their two seasons working together. Ladd stated in interviews there were some days Jackson would not even speak to her.
  • Era magazines in Spain consistently reported that Ladd was jealous of Shelley Hack from the get-go, because Shelley's height made her uncomfortable and she felt dwarfed by it. Ladd also wanted to be "the only blonde on the show". They further claimed that Cheryl bullied Shelley, often to tears, and constantly walked into the producers' office and demanded Shelley's lines, so as to diminish her role. (Ladd was often the star of the episode, since her arrival.) Indeed, Tiffany incidentally had less and less to say as the show progressed. Eventually, Ladd threatened to walk unless Shelley was fired, the Spanish magazines reported that she got her way: rather than deal with the drama, Shelley chose to leave on her own. However, it would appear that none of this ever made the U.S. press. It is unclear if there ever was any truth to these published facts, or from where they were obtained, but Spanish fans still hold Ladd directly responsible for Shelley's departure. Strangely enough, as if to expunge her mea culpa, in later interviews, Ladd often claimed that she took one look at Tanya Roberts when she came on-board, referred to her as a bitch and said something to the effect of: "I don't want to work with her, she is too sexy!" This was supposed to be a self-humbling declaration on Ladd's part.
• Charmed:
  • The animosity between the three (eventually four) lead actresses has evolved into the stuff of legend. Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs had been friends prior to the show, and the latter even convinced the former to sign on in the first place. They were good enough friends with Alyssa Milano to act as her bridesmaids during the first season, but all parties began to fall out during the second. The network started actively pitting the actresses against each other to prevent them banding together the way the Friends cast famously had at the time, and Holly admitted that the frustration with frequent clashes with the higher-ups over the lack of resources provided for the stunts and special effects as well as Showrunner Constance M. Burge being ousted from her position lead to the girls "just going at it", Alyssa confessing there were some days when they would only speak to each other to say their lines and that the set sometimes felt "like high school". Although Shannen claimed for years that her departure at the end of Season 3 was something she had been pushing for out of creative frustration and feeling that Prue had run her course as a character, she revealed in a 2023 podcast interview that she actually was fired because Alyssa had threatened to sue for creating a toxic work environment. The latter maintained that she had no power to get anyone fired, and that she was the only one of the actresses to speak to the corporate mediator the network had hired. Whatever the case, none of the actresses ever appeared at a convention panel together even twenty-five years later, and Holly became rather infamous in the fandom for which of her co-stars she was not speaking to at a given time.
  • It was rumored at the time that Ted King, who played Andy, was killed off at the end of Season 1 because he and Shannen didn't get along either. Other sources say he left to pursue other roles or asked for more screen time but the writers had no more ideas for him. He later said of her:
  "I like Shannen, I think she's a straight shooter. I don't know where the press was getting their information but with me she's been nothing but honest, hard-working and a complete professional."
  • During a 2010 convention appearance, Armin Shimerman, who guest starred in an episode in Season 4 when Rose McGowan joined the cast, made clear his dislike towards all three of the show's leads, saying it was all too apt that they were playing witches.
  • McGowan likewise got into a very public Twitter spat with Alyssa in 2020 where she accused her of making the set "toxic af". When working on Charmed, McGowan was dealing with the fallout from her sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein, who subsequently had her blacklisted from Hollywood over it, which wasn't helped by the long shooting hours. The production itself was extremely hectic, as there was no on-set producer and it was nearly impossible to get the show runners on the phone to verify dialogue changes, meaning that the actresses themselves served as de facto producers.
  • Danielle Harris, who had a guest spot in the first season's "The Fourth Sister", had a miserable time on set, claiming Alyssa tried to tell her what to do, the three leads were "always fighting" and Shannen was very mean to her in particular after a crew member she had previously dated started flirting with Danielle to get back at her.
• Cheers:
  • There were rumours that Shelley Long didn't get along with her co-stars, which have since been confirmed by most of the show's cast and crew in retrospect. She often kept to herself between takes and was also said to be perceived as seeing herself "above" those with whom she worked on the show. She did get on with Nicholas Colasanto (Coach). His tragic death in 1985 during the filming of Season 3 not only demoralized the cast, but it left her without an ally among them, and this likely contributed to her decision to leave the show after Season 5.
  • The timing of Colasanto's death coincided with the introduction of the character of Dr. Frasier Crane, played by Kelsey Grammer. Long was what we would today call a major Sam/Diane shipper, and didn't appreciate the character of Frasier interfering with their romance. Grammer, for his part, claimed that Long tried to have all of his punchlines removed from the script but Long denies this. The writers of the show loved Grammer and what he brought to the role of Frasier, tending to side with him over Long whenever there were any disputes between them. (Grammer stated that he and Long made peace with each other during her guest appearance on Frasier.)
  • One of Long's biggest enemies on set was Rhea Perlman, which no doubt enhanced the antipathy between their characters. When GQ did its retrospective on the series, the interviewer asked Perlman if Long's antics annoyed her: "I can't go there again. I just can't. Life is too short".
  • In the Cheers biography documentary, Ted Danson admitted there was tension between him and Long but "never at a personal level and always at a work level" due to their different modes of working. Two examples of this, both admitted by Long herself: she apparently asked "too many questions" of the writers (which Long said was based on a desire to better understand her character and motivation); and she was always late to filming (according to Long, because makeup and hair took much longer for her than her castmates, which they were not sympathetic about). Danson also stated that Long was much more like her character than she would like to admit, but also said that her performances often "carried the show."
• Sophia Bush left Chicago P.D. under similar circumstances to Pauley Perrette's (see NCIS below), citing having to brave both the harsh Chicago weather and "a constant, onslaught barrage of abusive behavior" to the point that her body was "falling apart", as reasons for her departure. She'd brought up her concerns with the producers several times, but was rebuffed and when she threatened to quit if improvements weren't made, was refused her departure due to her seven-year contract. Four seasons in, she finally put her foot down and gave the producers the choice of letting her break her contract or suing the network. They opted for the former. It's been surmised that Jason Beghe's anger management problems, which got to the point that counselors had to be brought on-set to help him control his outbursts, were what she was at least partially refrrring to.
• Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada were often said to frequently clash while making CHiPs, and did not get along well with each other during the production of this show. This was reported to be a factor in Wilcox's decision to quit the series. Estrada was said to be similarly displeased working with Tom Reilly, who replaced Wilcox as Ponch's partner Officer Bob "Bobby" Nelson.
• Community:
  • The feud between Chevy Chase and Dan Harmon on the set has been well documented. Creator Harmon was not above making fun of actor Chase publicly, and Chase was increasingly uncomfortable with his on-screen character's bigotry, leading to a hate-filled voice mail to Harmon.
  • Not to say that Chase wasn't acting this way to just the creator/writers. In 2018, Donald Glover stated that the actor had made racist jokes to him, among which he said that "People think you're funnier because you're black."
  • For Harmon's part, Megan Ganz, one of the show's writers, accused him in 2018 of sexually harassing her on set. Harmon admitted the accusations were true and apologized.
• Criminal Minds: Thomas Gibson got fired after he fought one of the episode writers while filming Season 12. As a result, Aaron Hotchner left the BAU and was Put on a Bus.
• The Cybill set was not a happy place for most of the cast and crew, by their own accounts due to star Cybill Shepherd's behavior. Writer Alan Ball mainly stuck around for the money and later admitted he had zero respect for the show's star. As for the cast, Alan Rosenberg described it as the worst job he ever had, Alicia Witt confirmed there was a fair amount of tension on the set, while the experience led Peter Krause to consider quitting acting altogether. Christine Baranski has largely kept her mouth shut, though Liz Smith did once report that Baranski claimed she'd someday reveal how "bad" Shepherd was. Allegedly, much of the hostility stemmed from Baranski's Emmy win, while Shepherd herself lost. Many believe that was the catalyst which led to Shepherd having Chuck Lorre fired, and subsequently assuming more creative control to look after her own self-interest.
• Although the cast of Dad's Army generally got on well with each other, there were problems between some actors:
  • John Laurie intensely disliked Arnold Ridley, often needling him about his advanced age and frailty (although Laurie was only a year younger than Ridley). Laurie was also irritated that Ridley was let off from some of the more strenuous aspects of filming, while he was not. On the other hand, Ian Lavender would recall them having deep conversations based on a Commonality Connection; how horrific they'd found the First World War.
  • Laurie generally made no secret of his feelings that the material was beneath him and resented the fact that "this crap" was all the public knew him for, complaining that he had once been one of the most prolific Shakespearean stage actors, appeared opposite Laurence Olivier and acted for Alfred Hitchcock during the interwar period. He also didn't hold much regard for David Croft and Jimmy Perry, at one point calling them "damned nearly illiterate" to their faces and threatening to phone in his performance if they wrote him a small part.
  • Arthur Lowe and Clive Dunn didn't get on due to the two men's personal politics (Lowe was a staunch supporter of the Conservative Party whereas Dunn was an enthusiastic and committed socialist).
  • Several cast members took exception when Dunn, a friend and supporter of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, was appointed an OBE when none of the other main actors were similarly honoured.
  • Bill Pertwee claimed that he was looked down on by some of the other actors because of his background in variety rather than "serious" theatre.
  • Lowe's refusal to take scripts home with him ("I'm not having that rubbish in the house") also rankled with his co-stars, as it meant he could never remember his lines.
  • James Beck used to enjoy riling up Croft after a few gin and tonics by saying that he wouldn't say certain lines in the script, only stopping his joking when Croft would threaten to cancel his contract.
• Designing Women:
  • Delta Burke publicly feuded not only with the show's creators, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, due to long hours, labor disputes, and the direction of the show, she also feuded with co-star and on-screen sister Dixie Carter due to her repeatedly siding with the Thomasons over her. This all culminated in her firing, but she did eventually make up with all three of them (though she and Carter didn't speak for ten years).
  • A more minor example came with Carter, who was a staunch libertarian while Bloodworth-Thomason was an equally staunch liberal, with Carter's character Julia Sugarbaker serving as a mouthpiece for Bloodworth-Thomason's politics who regularly goes on fiery political rants. They soon came to a deal: every time Carter had to deliver a monologue that she disagreed with, she got to sing on air in a future episode. (Carter did wind up supporting Bill Clinton later on, though.)
• Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher did not get along well with her co-stars, and it got to the point that her name was absent on the stars' farewell gift to the crew.
• Doctor Who is one of the most candidly-documented shows ever, but most actors still insist that they all got along famously. There are only a handful of cases of people admitting the opposite:
  • Michael Craze, who played Ben, one of William Hartnell's last two companions, has said that Hartnell was extremely nasty to both him and Anneke Wills (Polly), the third regular cast member at the time. This was probably partly due to Hartnell's dementia and partly to him being unhappy about his impending departure from the show. Hartnell also had a poor working relationship with producer John Wiles, whose attempts to make the show Darker and Edgier didn't go over well with Hartnell who as the sole remaining member of the original team saw himself as the guardian of the series' original values. When Wiles' attempts to remove the star were unsuccessful, he removed the actors who played Vicki and Steven Taylor, his co-stars Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves (the latter revealed that he has no fond memories of Wiles).
  • Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee reportedly did not get on during the making of "The Three Doctors", due to a clash of acting styles. (Troughton's tendency to ad-lib whenever he thought he could improve on the script unsettled Pertwee, who preferred to play the part as written.) Terrance Dicks remembered this and wrote "The Five Doctors" so that the two of them wouldn't share a scene until the big final confrontation between everyone, which ended up upsetting both actors, who had become friends later through doing fan conventions together.
  • Tom Baker and Louise Jameson, who played Leela, have admitted that they got on very badly, because Jameson couldn't put up with Baker's ego, while Baker didn't think that the Doctor should be tolerating Leela's Psycho Sidekick tendencies and allowed his dislike for the character to bleed into his treatment of her actress. He did soften to her eventually and they buried the hatchet enough to record audio plays together.
  • Baker clashed with his second producer Graham Williams over his demand for greater creative control. After season sixteen, their conflict escalated to the point where both of them threatened to resign. This was eventually settled when when Williams advised Head of Drama Shaun Sutton that Baker was bluffing, which he was.
  • There were also periods of virulent feuding between Baker and Lalla Ward, who played the second incarnation of Romana, but that was down to the up-and-down progress of their Romance on the Set. (Once asked by an interviewer who was the worst monster she had faced on the show, Ward promptly replied "Tom Baker", which in turn amused Baker when he heard about it.) To this day, Baker and Ward have never recorded a Big Finish Audio in the same room, despite having appeared together in dozens of them. Both Baker and Ward reportedly did not get on with Matthew Waterhouse, because they thought he was incompetent and didn't like the concept of his character. Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton both found Baker intimidating.
  • In a weird example, while Tom Baker got along fine with John Leeson, the voice of K9, he was hostile to the K9 prop itself for being slow, awkward and breaking down constantly - an admittedly common complaint behind the scenes (Douglas Adams being prone to putting jabs in the script referring to the little robot heading off at "what passes for top speed", for example).
  • Recalling the filming of "A Fix with Sontarans" after Jimmy Savile was exposed as a sexual predator, Colin Baker described Savile's demeanour as "neither friendly, nor inclusive" and "creepy and patronising", and the working environment as "very much his territory and his agenda".
  • In this interview, Paul McGann and Daphne Ashbrook have nothing but nice things to say about almost everything about the TV movie... except Eric Roberts, who was apparently standoffish, rude (making personal remarks about McGann being "effeminate"), and sometimes "amazingly bad".
  • John Barrowman revealed that he didn't get on with Christopher Eccleston:
    Chris was always grumpy. You don't always have to be intense. There comes a point when intensity makes you miserable - I think that was the case with Chris. I much prefer working with David - he likes to have a bit more fun, he's more charismatic as a person. Chris might have been a great Doc but he was darker and had a chip on his shoulder, he was not as much fun on set as David. I will give him the credit that he was the first Doctor to bring back the series and made a damn good job of it. But I just wouldn't go to the pub with him. On the other hand, David's been to my house, we went to the Madonna concert with our partners - we socialise together. He's a lot more fun.
  • Eccleston for his part claimed that he didn't enjoy the onset environment due to conflicts with certain people behind the scenes. In a series of 2018 interviews with Radio Times, he claims that his working relationship with Russell T Davies broke down during filming on the series; since Eccleston was known primarily for his serious dramatic roles, he wasn't entirely comfortable in a more light-hearted series. He also claims that he was blacklisted by certain powers that be at The BBC for a few years, for leaving the show, and he had to work in America until there was a "regime change". He said that, as a result, he will never work with Davies again because, despite his promise to not to say anything that might ruin the fledgling revival's reputation, he was still blacklisted. Davies either supported it, or did nothing to help Eccleston out. When it was announced that Eccleston would appear in Big Finish Doctor Who which Davies has no involvement with, Eccleston gave this quote to the press release: "Forget producers, forget politics – here are real people who have seen me do my stuff and want to shake my hand".
  • Tom Baker claimed that he was mostly ignored on the set of "The Day of the Doctor", with the exception of Matt Smith, whom he got on very well with.
  • Steven Moffat reportedly had a fractuous relationship with producer Caroline Skinner. This reached breaking point during season seven when she resigned following a blazing row with Moffat.
  • This may have been the cause of Doctor Who Magazine's notorious car-crash interview with Clive Swift (guest character Mr. Copper in "Voyage of the Damned"), in which Swift is clearly not interested in engaging with such an interview, and ends up expressing contempt for the interviewer, the magazine, the show and the fans. Benjamin Cook, the aforementioned interviewer, would later refer to claims that Swift had been "a sod" on set, suggesting that the production team had therefore approved the interview because they knew he didn't want to do it. Davies later said he regretted doing so, noting that when you employ an actor you should have a duty of care to them.
• On the later seasons of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes' tendency to do rewrites on set, with most of the actors having to remain in their tight Edwardian costumes under hot lights as spoiling dinner food fouled the air, did not endear him to many of the main cast. Others had also been alienated by his vindictive tendency to have minor characters killed off offscreen when the actors were too busy doing other work to come back to the show. By the end of the series many were swearing they'd never work with him again.^note Although some did for the 2019 movie
• Dynasty (1981):
  • Joan Collins and John Forsythe didn't get along, which added a lot to their characters' volatile relationship. Ironically, she got on fine with Linda Evans.
  • George Peppard was the original Blake Carrington, but producers found him so difficult to work with that he was replaced with John Forsythe. He would eventually end up starring on another popular 80s show and also dealt with similar issues there as well.
• ER:
  • Noah Wyle (John Carter) and Kellie Martin (Lucy Knight) did not get along, resulting in her character not being used very much or developed (once he nixed plans for her to be his girlfriend) ^note To be fair, he also truthfully pointed out that such a relationship would be inappropriate (because she was a student) and out of character for Carter. and her deciding to leave the show.
  • Wyle's attitude apparently also affected other co-stars. Reportedly, when Wyle once complained about the buffet for cast and crew, Goran Višnjić (Luka Kovac) snapped "How dare you complain about this food when there are people all over the world who would give their lives for a fraction of what you have!" (Apparently this was due to the Croatian Višnjić's experiences as a veteran of The Yugoslav Wars.)
• Multiple cast and crew members of The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) got along poorly with Frank Langella, reportedly due to his conduct with others on and off-set being highly inappropriate and offensive (which Langella defended as jokes). Many people reportedly felt uncomfortable around him and Ruth Codd outright left the set in the middle of filming a sex scene due to Langella's behaviour towards her. It was bad enough that Langella was booted off the show midway through filming and replaced with Bruce Greenwood; Kate Siegel stated in a podcast interview there was "palpable relief from everyone" over the recasting and that Greenwood, comparatively, behaved respectfully and professionally.

• Family Matters: The reason youngest child Judy infamously vanished out of existence in the fourth season was because actress Jaimee Foxworth didn't get along with Steve Urkel's actor Jaleel White. Foxworth talked on Facebook about one incident where White berated her in front of the studio audience when she forgot her line. As a result, the characters didn't interact much, and as Steve became the show's big draw, Judy had less and less to do, leading to her unceremonious exit.
• Fantasy Island: Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villechaize didn't get along, and the former's disdain for the latter is very often seen in the show itself. Montalbán didn't bother hiding his annoyance during their scenes. (A Bloom County comic strip at the time suggested Montalbán's fantasy was for Tattoo to drive a 1982 Chrysler Cordoba off a cliff.) Villechaize eventually demanded to be paid as much as Montalbán and was subsequently fired.
• The premise of the French sitcom Les Filles d'à côté^note  The Girls Next Door was a trio of women getting back together after failed marriages and sharing an apartment as single girls-about-town. Despite the fact that the characters are best friends, there was an awful lot of not-so-pleasant chirping between the three principal actresses off-stage. It didn't help that the producer Jean-Luc Azoulay is a dictatorial Control Freak, and an insane production schedule calling for at least three (and sometimes four) completed episodes a week and filming could often drag on till the early hours of the following morning.
  • Helene le Moignic (Magalie), the only one of the trio not to come from a "proper" acting background in film, TV and theatre, claimed that she was frozen out and snubbed straight away by co-star Cécile Auclert (Fanny), who considered it beneath her dignity to speak to the amateur upstart. It did not help that Magalie was considered to be the plum role and Auclert had really wanted this part rather than Fanny. Le Moignic alleges Auclert took out this resentment on her continually, and used her clout with the producers to have scripts rewritten at the last minute so that Fanny got more punchlines and more screen-time. Le Moignic also alleged that the third star, Christiane Jean (Claire), could be amenable if Auclert was not around but tended to side with her like a spineless schoolgirl sucking up to the Alpha Bitch. Neither Auclert nor Jean have spoken publicly about any alleged rows on set, but both have conceded that time spent on this show was not happy, and it contributed to a disillusionment with TV acting.^note Auclert in particular, rather than speaking on her time on this particular show or on any clashes with other people involved in it, has spoken more about her "disappointment" at being written out of TV shows in general, abruptly and without explanation, as well as of broken promises made by producers and directors. She too no longer works or has any desire to work in TV, saying: "I live as a hermit in 33 square metres of Marseilles but what the hell, I'm free." As of May 2018, le Moignic is on probation for violent assault on her partner and has been advised to seek anger-management therapy.
  • Supporting actress Dan Simkovitch (Georgette Bellefeuille) described Christiane Jean as bring cold and distant but always polite. She notes a gulf between the core cast and the supporting actors, and said it took le Moignic the best part of three months even to say "hello" to her. "There was something wrong about her" she said. Simkovitch says pay and working conditions were appalling, and alleges that after an accident on set (involving a negligently assembled set and unsecured props) requiring medical attention and which put her in a wheelchair for a short period, her pay was docked for non-attendance and the producers gave her an ultimatum - come in to do your job, even in a wheelchair, or you are sacked. No asking after her health and certainly no sick pay - just "work or be sacked". She was employed by the day and had no long-term contract or job security, and strongly feels she was exploited - especially since she was having difficulties with the Social Security administration and needed the work. She also highlighted the insane production schedule - four days a week, notionally from 8:00 am to 10:00pm but often longer, for four days a week, together with the fact she often did not receive her script until the very last minute - as factors that made the show such a treadmill. She also feels she was singled out for workplace bullying because of her trade union membership and left-wing politics - not liked at all by Azoulay, and that this resulted in her sacking. In an interview, she likened the AB production studios to a concentration camp for actors and described dreams about the studios being surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. She is also in dispute with AB over royalties and residuals owing to her from video and DVD releases, as well as from re-runs on national TV, and has not received a centime.
  • It appears Thierry Redler, who played the abominable Marc, was universally liked by all his co-stars. Nobody appears to have a bad word to say about him and his young co-star Vincent Latorre (who played Claire's brattish son) was especially appreciative of how Redler put himself out to be supportive, friendly, and something of a mentor to the young teenage boy on set. Latorre describes Redler as unselfish and one who thought of his own needs last of all. Dan Simkovitch also spoke warmly of both him and Gérard Vives (Gérard).
• Firefly, like the aforementioned Buffy and Angel, also reportedly suffered from Joss Whedon's Prima Donna Showrunner tendencies. Writer Jose Melina stated that Whedon treated the show's writing staff like dirt and thought it was funny to be mean to them, with the female writers singled out for the worst of it. According to him, Whedon would boast of an incident where he made one of his writers cry twice during a meeting.
• Alfonso Ribeiro confirmed that the whole cast of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was like one big family, except for Janet Hubert-Whitten, who was difficult to work with and toxic to be around, and really killed the mood on set. This was further corroborated by James Avery in a June 2013 edition of omg! Insider, in which he remarked that he constantly had to remind Hubert-Whitten that the show was The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, not "Philip and Vivian of Bel-Air." She was allegedly fired from the show due her conflict with Will Smith which lasted all the way to 2020, where they finally buried the hatchet when the cast came together for a reunion special celebrating 30 years of the show.
  • Tatyana Ali is said to have been very doubtful of Will's acting potential during the earliest episodes of the show, saying that he constantly messed up his lines. Because of this, there was slight tension between them while on set.
• Friends:
  • Jennifer Aniston's real-life fiancé Tate Donovan was cast as Rachel's boyfriend, but their relationship deteriorated during his run and they broke up both on the show and in real life. Donovan outright said the experience was awful.
  • Subverted with the rumor that guest star Reese Witherspoon supposedly didn't get along with Jennifer Aniston; it wasn't true in the slightest, and Witherspoon and Aniston became good friends instead. Depending on who you ask, she couldn't return either due to her film commitments, or because she wasn't comfortable with the filming process for a three-camera sitcom — but either way, it had nothing to do with Aniston, and the two would reunite for The Morning Show years later.
  • Paul Rudd much later confessed that he felt out of place on the show, being brought in very late in the series to be Phoebe's successful romantic interest. Recognizing this, in the Grand Finale he tried to be funny by saying things like "We made it, guys!" Since everyone else was emotionally distraught with the ending of the show, it didn't go over very well.
  • Kathleen Turner, who played Chandler's father, said that she found the main cast not welcoming, calling them a "clique". She recalled one time when she was wearing a difficult gown and her high heels were "killing" her, and found it odd that none of them thought to offer her a seat, before one of the older crew members did so. She credited it on them being "such a tight little group that nobody from the outside mattered", though she did however "respect the camaraderie they had."
• Full House: Bob Saget and John Stamos initially didn't get along when the show first started. Stamos was said to have taken the acting seriously, while Saget had the tendency to make any person laugh. It was said the clashing styles didn't really lead the two to get along at first. They would work out their differences eventually by finding common ground and the two would become very good friends later on. When Saget died in 2022, Stamos appeared to be the most devastated amongst the cast members who publicly shared their grief.
• Before ever being part of Game of Thrones, Jerome Flynn (Bronn) and Lena Headey (Queen Cersei) were in a relationship that did not end well. As a result, it's rumored that the two had it written into their contracts that they wouldn't ever have to share a scene and are never on the set at the same time in order to prevent any hostility from occurring. There are lots of scenes on the show where one of their characters conveniently exits the scene just before the other enters. Normally it isn't too noticeable until Season 8, when Cersei hires Bronn to go North to assassinate her brothers... with Qyburn as the middleman. You'd think that for something so deeply personal, Cersei would have spoken with Bronn herself. However, Flynn debunked reports that he and Headey weren't on speaking terms in a 2019 Q&A.
• While the rest of the Gilligan's Island cast got along famously well, Tina Louise (Ginger) did not. She felt the show was beneath her and feared it would keep her from doing Shakespeare on stage as she really wanted. This attitude did not endear her to the rest of the cast; as a result (egged on by a popular fansite on the early internet) it was long-rumored that she would have been written off in the hastily-canceled fourth season. But this has been debunked; Tina was asked directly and although (as always) she made no secret of her disdain for the show, she had every intention of coming back for a fourth season.
• On Glee, Lea Michele played the prima donna theater brat Rachel Berry, and by all accounts, her character's bad attitude was a pretty good reflection of her real-life personality.
  • Naya Rivera confirmed in her biography that she didn't get along with Michele, to the point where they were not on speaking terms by Season 6. However, she also added that the rumors of their feud were blown out of proportion.
  • Samantha Marie Ware (who played Jane Hayward in Season 6) was not nearly so diplomatic, accusing Michele of making her life a "living hell" on set. Michele tweeting in support of the Black Lives Matter movement was the last straw for Ware (who is Black), who called Michele a hypocrite and accused her of subjecting her to routine racist abuse on set, including claiming that she'd "shit in [her] wig". Ware claimed that she almost quit Hollywood because of her experience. Shortly after, several of Michele's co-stars from Glee and other projects she'd worked on all chimed in to support Ware's accusations, with some of them adding their own horror stories of working with Michele and even those defending her from some of the worst charges admitting that she was unpleasant to work with.
  • As for the rest of the cast, both Ryan Murphy and Marti Noxon have said that many of the male actors on the show did not get along with each other and that some of them also acted like bullies, but that it never got as much attention as the reports of Michele's diva behavior.
• Terry Scott (well known for being difficult to work with) was a nightmare behind the scenes of The Gnomes of Dulwich, emptying sets by raging at how intolerable the conditions of making the series were. He later remarked that people wanted to shoot him after filming, while he only wanted to shoot himself.
• The Golden Girls: Bea Arthur reportedly did not get along with her co-stars very well. Betty White admitted that they did not have a good relationship, and that Bea found Betty's optimism annoying. Rue McClanahan has said she didn't have a relationship with Bea either, despite the fact that they had worked together before on Maude, calling her very eccentric. With the exception of Betty and Rue, the cast weren't really friends. That said, all four maintained that they respected each other professionally and worked well together regardless of any personal differences.
• Good Times: Jimmie Walker (JJ) often clashed with the actors playing his onscreen parents, John Amos (James) and Esther Rolle (Florida), as they felt his slapstick comedy reeked of Uncle Tomfoolery. However, Walker had the producers on his side, who encouraged his dy-no-mite behavior because JJ had become the show's Breakout Character. As a result, Amos was released from his contract in the third season due to his disagreements, with the explanation that James died offscreen. Rolle, having lost her ally in the cast, left the show after the fourth season, her own disappearance explained as her remarrying and moving to Arizona with her new husband. When ratings sank due to viewers feeling the show had Jumped the Shark without its two original leads, the producers begged Rolle to come back, but one of her demands was for JJ to grow up and become the man of the house. The producers acquiesced, but Rolle and Walker had a chilly relationship for the remainder of the series. Even when Rolle passed away in 1998, Walker was the only former Good Times castmember not to attend her funeral.
• Another notorious example was the dislike between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi during later seasons of The Good Wife, which led to them refusing to be on set together to the point that a pivotal scene in the Series Finale had to be created using green-screen.
  • This has never been confirmed by anyone involved in the show, least of all the two actresses. But fans noticed that for the last two seasons, despite having reconciled to their original best-friends status after their characters grew distant, the two characters were never seen talking to each other in the same room. The green-screen was explained by the creators as necessitated by Panjabi's schedule, only for her to immediately contradict that on Twitter.
• Grace Under Fire's cast suffered from Brett Butler's antics:
  • The rumor that most persistently dogs the show (it was never officially confirmed by the actor - possibly as the result of a non-disclosure agreement - but is widely considered credible) is that Brett Butler flashed Jon Paul Steuer, then a 12-year-old child actor playing her son, after she had gotten breast implants. She apparently showed off her new breasts to just about everyone on set, but she probably should have drawn the line at her underage co-stars. As a result, Steuer's parents pulled him out of the show after the third season, with the studio quietly paying off the remaining two years of his contract in lieu of the incident being made officially public (or to prevent a costly and embarrassing lawsuit). Steuer had to quit acting afterwards, because whenever he would try out for a part all anyone would want to talk to him about were his experiences working with Butler.^note As an adult he became a musician and then a restaurateur before he tragically committed suicide in 2018 at the age of 33.
  • Julie White, who played Grace's best friend Nadine, left the show in disgust at her antics at the end of the following season, necessitating a separation between her now-absent character Nadine and her husband Wade, played by Casey Sander (who stayed behind). As had been the case with Steuer, White saw the remaining year of her contract paid up despite her departure.
  • Not to say that the writers got off easy. Chuck Lorre probably thought creating his own show would insulate him from The Prima Donna antics of his star like what he had faced over on Roseanne. (He probably should have talked to Matt Williams first...) He faced Creative Differences with Butler almost instantly and the studio sided with her over him, so he was out by the end of the second season. Lorre, undeterred, dusted himself off and created Cybill, presumably thinking that a washed-up has-been like Cybill Shepherd wouldn't give him any trouble. (Should have talked to Glenn Cordon Caron first...)
• Growing Pains suffered through this after Kirk Cameron became a born-again Christian in the middle of Season 3. Immediately thereafter, he began alienating most of the cast and crew with his Holier Than Thou attitude.
  • Cameron got into frequent clashes with the writers for adding even the slightest bit of innuendo in the scripts, and many of the lines Cameron refused to say ended up being transferred to other cast members, primarily Jeremy Miller, who played Cameron's younger brother.
  • Cameron also used his reputation as the de facto star as leverage to fire those he had issues with. Most notably, Cameron's mother, who was also his agent, pressured the producers to fire Julie McCullough, a former Playboy model from the show or else he wouldn't renew his contract. McCullough claims she was specifically targeted because of her Playboy past, though Cameron denied it. Finally, the producers had enough and demanded to ABC executives that they fire Cameron; the network refused and the producers quit.
  • Eventually, Cameron cut all ties with his TV family; he refused to invite them to his wedding, and Tracey Gold refused to invite Cameron to hers, suspecting that Cameron wouldn't attend. It wasn't until the Growing Pains reunion movie in 2000 that he ended up making contact with them again, and owned up to his past behavior.
• Leonard Roberts hoped that the role of D.L. Hawkins on Heroes would be his Star-Making Role, but instead, it "nearly broke him." Much of it came down to friction with his co-star Ali Larter, who played his character's wife Niki Sanders, and the indifference shown to it by Showrunner Tim Kring. D.L. and Niki were portrayed as being in a fraught relationship, and this was reflected in Roberts and Larter's interactions, with Larter often dismissing and belittling Roberts and feeling uncomfortable shooting intimate scenes with him. The fact that Larter was white and Roberts was Black also added a racial dimension to their hostility, especially since she had no such reservations about shooting a similar, more explicit scene where she seduces her white co-star Adrian Pasdar. Other people who had worked on Heroes reported that Larter was a divisive presence in general, and got along poorly with several people on set. During production, TV Guide published a blind item reporting hostility between two unnamed opposite-sex co-stars to the point where their scenes together had been cut down, and Roberts not only confirmed that it was about him and Larter, he mentions bringing it up with producer Dennis Hammer, who simply assured him that they were taking care of it. When Roberts learned that two other non-white characters, Isaac and Simone, were due to be killed off, he started getting nervous about the fate of D.L., culminating in him being pulled into Kring's office with Hammer before the start of production on season 2. There, he was told plainly that the "Ali Larter situation" had led to D.L. being killed off between seasons. The stress of his experience working on Heroes dealt a serious blow to his career; only in 2017 did he land another major role, as Ray Stabler on Mom.
• Hi-de-Hi!:
  • Barry Howard turned to drink as the show went on and he got more and more unhappy with his role. Jimmy Perry kept giving him chances to improve but grew frustrated with Howard's behaviour, especially when Howard pushed one of the Yellowcoat girls into the pool during the filming of Series 7. Howard was let go at the end of that series.
  • David Griffin didn't have a particularly happy time on set. While his castmates weren't nasty to him, they would constantly bring up Simon Cadell (who Griffin had replaced when he chose to leave), making it hard for Griffin to fit in with the rest of the cast.
  • Linda Regan got on the bad side of David Croft during the rehearsals for "Man Trap"; she was scripted to slap Jeffrey Holland, but felt bad and didn't want to do it, making Croft madder and madder each time. On the night, however, Regan didn't hold back and cracked Holland one harder than anyone was expecting, much to her horror afterward.
• One of the many aspects of the Troubled Production of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) was the ongoing dispute between Douglas Adams and producer Alan Bell. Adams thought that Bell, a Light Entertainment man, just didn't get science fiction, while Bell thought Adams didn't get the realities of television and kept coming up with unfilmable ideas. (He also claimed that the best television was made like this, and when everyone got on it was a disaster.) Adams also claimed the actors (and indeed the tea-lady, but that's probably comic licence) didn't get on with Bell either, and Mark Wing-Davey at least has said he always felt like Bell resented the radio actors getting first refusal on the roles.
• In an interview long after Home Improvement ended, Patricia Richardson said that it was ultimately her decision that lead led to the show ending. The full story was that she needed to focus on her family and refused any amounts of money offered to her for a ninth season; Tim Allen in turn wanted to play Tim Taylor forever and tried to convince her otherwise. But when the network execs started pitching a "Jill dies, show continues on" approach, Allen sided with Richardson and made the decision to end the show. Despite remaining on good terms, Richardson said she felt Allen quietly resented her for having to make that decision.
• Vivian Vance and William Frawley, who played Ethel and Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy, despised one another. The contempt grew to such extremes that Vance would often memorize her scripts just to see how much screen time she had with Frawley. Frawley was reportedly furious with Vance for turning down an opportunity to make a Fred and Ethel spinoff after the conclusion of the series. Legend has it that Vance, upon hearing that Frawley was dead, ordered Champagne for the entire restaurant she was in. Despite the hostilities, both were said to be true professionals on the set and were noted for their amazing chemistry with each other on screen, to the point that when it first came out, fans of the show could not believe it. That being said, part of why they worked on screen together was in part because the pair played an embodiment of Like an Old Married Couple.
• No one was expecting Michael Bates, who was suffering from cancer at the time, to return for Series 5 of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, so David Croft didn't include him in a picture for the front cover of the Radio Times alongside his costars, Windsor Davies, Melvyn Hayes, and Don Estelle. Bates did end up returning and was understandably furious at his absence, but never voiced his opinion on the matter.
• It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling...:
  • Writer Jilly Cooper recalls how her scripts constantly being picked apart and redone led to many rows which often left her crying.
  • The script doctor, Christopher Bond, clashed with David Croft over his rewrites, so Croft and Jeremy Lloyd withdrew from their writing duties after three episodes.
• John Stevenson, who wrote and created The Last of the Baskets, didn't have the best relationship with his star, Arthur Lowe, who thought he was above Stevenson.
• Last of the Summer Wine:
  • According to Peter Sallis, the series almost didn't get off the ground because of this. The original trio consisted of him, Bill Owen, and Michael Bates. Before filming the cast went out for dinner and Bates and Owen got into a blazing row about politics (Bates being very Conservative, Owen being very left-wing). It got so bad that the producer had to come in and read them the Riot Act. For the sake of the series, they agreed to never talk about politics again.
  • Tom Owen apparently had a very poor relationship with co-star Kathy Staff, claiming in a newspaper interview, that she constantly criticised and complained about him to other cast members behind his back.
• In Law & Order, this happened often in the show's early years:
  • George Dzundza disliked commuting from Los Angeles to shoot in New York and bristled at the show's focus on the ensemble over its leads (namely, him). This didn't endear him to said ensemble and he left after the first season. Allegedly he and his onscreen partner Chris Noth had a particular antipathy which, fortunately, added depth and realism to the squabbles between their characters. His replacement, Paul Sorvino, got along better with the cast but had trouble keeping up with the show's grueling filming schedule and asked to be released from his contract after just a season and a half. He was replaced by Jerry Orbach. Fortunately, everybody loved Jerry Orbach, up to and including the real NYPD.
  • Noth and Michael Moriarty were very displeased by the controversial removal of Dann Florek and Richard Brooks due to NBC wanting females added on the show, and their relationships with Dick Wolf went downhill as a result. Moriarty also became increasingly hostile to the show's "liberal" political bent (ironically, Wolf supported the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and other L&O cast member Senator Fred Thompson, both conservative Republicans), and wasn't pleased when Bill Clinton won the Presidential election in 1992. He constantly and very publicly attacked US Attorney General Janet Reno, accusing her of actively censoring network television and "forcing" shows like Law & Order to promote the agenda of the Clinton administration. Moriarty left at the end of the show's fourth season, and vowed never to return unless NBC fired Wolf (which as of this writing, they have yet to do). Tellingly, unlike Florek and Brooks and even Chris Noth, all of whom left the show on unpleasant terms, Moriarty has never returned to the franchise, and indeed, his character was killed offscreen on the Spin-Off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2018.
  • Noth stayed on an extra year, partly because he was very popular with female viewers, and partly because unlike Moriarty, he avoided tilting at windmills and focused his ire on Wolf himself. Noth even claimed the show was better with an all-male cast. After his contract was up at the end of the fifth season, Wolf declined to renew it and Noth was fired - and replaced with another Mr. Fanservice in Benjamin Bratt as the new junior detective. However, Noth and Wolf patched things up surprisingly quickly - just three years later Noth's character of Det. Mike Logan returned as the lead character of the only TV movie in the franchise's history, Exiled: A Law & Order Movie, and went on to costar on Law & Order: Criminal Intent after star Vincent D'Onofrio started to experience burnout due to the latter series' grueling schedule.
• The Likely Lads co-stars Rodney Bewes and James Bolam had minimal contact from 1977 until Bewes' death in 2017, but although Bewes frequently claimed the rift started after a single incident when he told an interviewer about the intensely private Bolam almost running his car off the road in surprise when his wife, Susan Jameson, told him she was pregnant (when Bewes called Bolam to apologise, Bolam slammed the phone down), while Bolam downplayed the rift entirely, the truth is that Bolam's feelings toward Bewes had been growing sour for years thanks to the latter's inability to keep a secret or to read a room if he was recounting (often exaggerated) personal show business anecdotes to uninterested audiences.^note  To illustrate their differing attitudes toward their personal lives, during filming of the original Likely Lads, Bolam shared a London flat with a young musician named Mark Field, and some accounts hold that Field chose the stage name Marc Bolan partly in tribute to his flatmate; however, Bolam has never discussed this publicly. By contrast, Bewes took a fleeting meeting with Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and expanded it into a frequently repeated claim that Hendrix had played electric guitar for the Likely Lads theme (which not only featured no guitar, but was composed by Ronnie Hazelhurst before Hendrix moved to England). Although the hostility was fairly one-sided on Bolam's part, his frustration with Bewes' Innocently Insensitive nature regarding personal boundaries simmered below the surface throughout filming of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and the 1976 Likely Lads feature film; rather than being a sudden end to a valued friendship, the 1977 interview incident was instead the straw that broke the camel's back for Bolam.
• It is rumored that Joseph Mawle left The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power because of some tension on the set. Apparently, he had many key scenes cut down and he felt disrespected. The only proof for this, is a deleted Facebook message made by the son of one of the actors playing Orcs, Jed Brophy, where he talks about Adar's cut scenes.
• Loretta Young carried her Swear Jar over to her self-titled show, with one particular incident involving the notoriously foul-mouthed Ethel Merman. According to Stephen Sondheim, Young kept chastising Merman for letting profanity slip, at the end of the day Merman dug into her purse and handed over a bill, saying "Loretta, here's ten bucks. Now go fuck yourself!"
• MADtv: According to interviews with both Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, cast member Aries Spears was cold to them and oftentimes difficult to work with. Bobby Lee has also spoken poorly of Spears on his podcast (along with several of his other castmates), and the show even played with Kayfabe in a season 4 sketch purportedly based on a "real" TV Guide article reporting backstage tensions between Spears and Nicole Sullivan. Spears, for his part, has accused Alex Borstein of racist remarks. Ironically, Lee, who (given Borstein's popular Ms. Swan character being widely regarded as an Asian caricature) you'd think might also have a bee in his bonnet about Borstein, remembers her fondly.
• On Married... with Children, Al and Marcy were archenemies, and actors Ed O'Neill and Amanda Bearse weren't much better. Bearse also didn't have the best relationship with David Faustino (Bud), to the point that the two men were the only former castmates not invited to her wedding. During the show's run, Bearse grew increasingly comfortable as a lesbian and began cutting her hair and dressing in a more masculine manner, which O'Neill criticized since her character was straight.^note You can see the evolution of Marcy's appearance in the show. In the early seasons, she had shoulder-length hair and was conventionally feminine, but later on she took a liking to power suits and progressively-shorter hairstyles, which could be interpreted in-universe as her wanting to be taken more seriously as her banking career advanced Nonetheless, he was offended by the snub and when he confronted her about it, she said she didn't want them snickering at her and her bride walking down the aisle in tuxedos. O'Neill responded by...admitting he would have acted exactly as she feared, entirely justifying her decision. Although Bearse shared the stage with O'Neill and Faustino during the Married... with Children reunion special, they tellingly do not interact with each other very much, even though the Sitcom Arch-Nemesis relationship between Al and Marcy is one of the most beloved aspects of the show. According to Ed O'Neill, their relationship was so bad that at one point, in front of the entire cast and crew, he reminded her of his postion as the undisputed star of the show (as opposed to hers, of a replacable supporting character), by stating that if he wanted to, he could go to the producers and tell them "I can’t work with her. She goes or I go. Who goes?"
• Not long after getting the hosting gig on Family Feud, Richard Dawson seemed to become increasingly detached from his role as a panelist on Match Game. From about 1976 until his departure from Match Game in 1978, Dawson became increasingly laconic and bitter, often giving blunt one-word answers, refusing to joke around, and at least once, refusing to smile even when host Gene Rayburn all but demanded him to. Dawson ironically later incited this on Feud itself, as the show's popularity led to him taking on a very self-centered approach, barring the producer from the set, hogging the spotlight with long rambling monologues, and even hiring his son to do some grunt work on the show. Feud creator Mark Goodson later remarked that Dawson gave him tsoris (Yiddish for "trouble") on Feud.
• Martin Lawrence clashed with Tisha Campbell (who played his wife Gina) and Garrett Morris (his boss Mr. Winters) while making Martin. Campbell actually left the show in the second half of the fifth season after suing Lawrence for sexual harassment; Gina's absence was usually handwaved with some line about her being away on business. She only agreed to come back for the two-part series finale after being assured that she wouldn't have to interact with Martin in any way. All of their scenes in the finale were filmed separately, and they only interacted by talking on the phone or yelling from another room. Eventually though, around 2020 Lawrence and Campbell have buried the hatchet and are now friends. Carl Anthony Payne II has also stated that he and Lawrence didn't get along, which is surprising considering their onscreen chemistry. Ironically, Lawrence did become close with Tichina Arnold, who played his arch-enemy Pam on the show, and they remain good friends to this day.
• Melrose Place:
  • Around Season 4, tensions between cast members and producers were spiking. In particular, Daphne Zuniga, who played photographer Jo Reynolds, was reportedly very unpopular with both the cast and crew and asked to be written out of the show before the season ended.
  • Also around this time and sometime after, many of the female co-stars were unhappy with the preferential treatment of Heather Locklear by both producers and the network (particularly with her increased salary over their own). This lead to the eventual resignations of both Laura Leighton (Sydney) and Courtney Thorne-Smith (Alison), who later resurfaced on fellow Fox shows Beverly Hills, 90210 and Ally McBeal, respectively.
• According to Larry Manetti, during the Crossover episode of Magnum, P.I. with Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury did not interact with him at all, and acted as though she was "above" him.
• Don Johnson and Edward James Olmos often argued during the first season of Miami Vice due to their different acting styles. Olmos used his anger towards Johnson for his character in their scenes together. In some episodes, Lt. Castillo never looks at Crockett at all.
• Reportedly on the set of Moesha, Brandy and co-star Countess Vaughn, who played her best friend Kim, did not get along. There were stories about how Vaughn would be the subject of numerous fat jokes that everyone except her were aware would be in the script and how Brandy, who even as a teenager, still would have a say over what was to be said, but did nothing out of jealousy over her popularity. There were also stories that Brandy and her on-screen stepmother, Sheryl Lee Ralph, did not get along, which were more or less confirmed when the former apologized to the latter years after the series ended.
• The onset conflict between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd on Moonlighting has been well documented. His success with Die Hard further strained their relationship. He became a major film star, and bristled at being the second-billed actor on a TV series and resented her, blaming her for many of the shooting delays.
• Mythbusters' Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman always tell anyone who will listen that they are not friends. Adam finds Jamie too serious and nitpicky, and Jamie finds Adam too goofy and (especially earlier in the series) sloppy. This being said, they have a fantastic working relationship, and have a high level of respect for each other, to the point that when producers attempted to inject "drama" into the show by showing more of their disagreements, they both refused, saying that they wanted to be professional, and it was more important to show them working well together in spite of their personal feelings, rather than playing up the rare moments their frustrations boiled over (which of course can happen even with good friends).
  Adam: We have respect for each other, but we also drive each other absolutely batty.
  • Behind-the-scenes articles, interviews, and books often mention a producer during the show's early seasons that was borderline abusive to much of the cast and widely disliked as a result. None of the Mythbusters have named this producer out of professionalism but the fandom is confident they know who it was.
• NCIS: Pauley Perrette decided to leave the show after a falling-out with Mark Harmon. Things degenerated to the point that she refused to be on the set at the same time he was, resulting in Abby and Gibbs having very few scenes together in Season 15, not even in her final episode... at least that's what the network says. Perrette has posted on Twitter that her reason for leaving may be due to sexual assault by someone she has yet to name, and accused CBS of lying about the reason to cover it up.
• Granada Television's 1968-73 sitcom Nearest and Dearest starred Jimmy Jewel and Hylda Baker as siblings who inherit a pickling business from their late father. It was originally conceived by writers Vince Powell and Harry Driver as a vehicle for Jewel, with Baker placed in a supporting role, but during rehearsals for the third episode, Baker began demanding more screen time and more funny lines, thereby earning Jewel's unending hatred. Both were convinced they were the real star, and for the rest of the series' run, whether on the small screen, the stage, or the big screen, they undermined each other any way they could. For example, if Baker found herself in the background of shots focusing on Jewel, she would perform visual gags to draw audience attention away from him. Meanwhile, as Baker needed to rely on cue cards for some of her more complicated Malapropism-laden lines (an aspect of her character she brought to the series from her stage work, over Jewel's objections), Jewel took to deliberately hiding the objects on which her lines were written to throw her off.^note  Baker's struggles to remember her lines on Nearest and Dearest are now believed to have been an early symptom of dementia, with which she was formally diagnosed in the 1980s. During the stage run, Baker stood outside the theatre on a chair with a tape measure to see if her credit on the poster was higher than Jewel's, and both performers demanded the best dressing room, forcing the theatre to create two identical "best" dressing rooms. By the fifth series, they only communicated through third parties and wouldn't look at each other unless the cameras were rolling. When the final episode aired, Baker threw an end-of-series party, but almost no-one attended, as the cast and crew were drained from the five-year war between her and Jewel and just wanted to move on.
• Mary Frann didn't have the best time working on Newhart, with the media constantly comparing her to her predecessor as Bob Newhart's TV wife, Suzanne Pleshette. The cast and crew of Newhart, including Bob himself, didn't seem terribly sympathetic, inviting Pleshette to make a backstage appearance during the filming of the show's first season, which Frann (though brushing it off when the media asked about it) did not appreciate. A surviving blooper showing Bob flubbing a take by referring to Frann's character Joanna as "Emily" got a great reaction from Frann (and the studio audience) but the dramatics of her sauntering off stage and taking her bows do suggest some irritation at even her co-star and onscreen husband failing to recognize her as her own woman. The show's infamous ending, relegating her entire character to having been a dream of Bob Hartley's, with Emily herself showing up in bed next to him, was the icing on the cake. Pleshette, many years later (and after Frann's too-early death in 1998) acknowledged in a candid interview for the Archive of American Television that she felt bad for Frann having to live and work in her shadow, and claimed to have snuck out of the series finale after-party as it "wasn't [her] house". (Although she apparently hung around for long enough that Lisa Kudrow - who played one of Larry, Darryl, and Darryl's wives - was able to meet her.)
• When Jon Lovitz joined the cast of NewsRadio following Phil Hartman's death, he took an instant hatred to Andy Dick, blaming him for Hartman's death by introducing Hartman's wife Brynn Omdahl to cocaine, which resulted in the murder-suicide that resulted in the deaths of Hartman and Omdahl.
• Night Court:
  • As the show went along, John Larroquette and Richard Moll grew to despise one another. Moll also couldn't get along with Harry Anderson after awhile, because Anderson was close with Larroquette. Reasons for the feud tend to boil down to both sides claiming the other was jealous over who was the true "star" of the show. It kept Moll from participating in the 30 Rock reunion (Larroquette had a filming commitment with Boston Legal at the time the show was taped). Moll also flatly turned down any suggestion that he might participate in the 2023 reboot.
  • Bob Perlow, the show's warm-up guy, has offered a very different explanation for Karen Austin's departure than the "official" Bell's Palsy story. Perlow claims Austin was very difficult to work with during her brief stint on the show, allegedly jealous over Harry Anderson having a larger and funnier role. Ultimately, Austin's anger caused her to physically attack Anderson, stabbing him with a pencil and throwing hot coffee in his face. Though Perlow did not witness this event, those who did told him security had to drag her out kicking and screaming. Needless to say, she never came back.
  • Also Moll (who was a classically trained actor) had very little patience for the relatively inexperienced actor Anderson, and in general grew increasingly fed up with the ad-libs and goofing around by the other actors on set.
• There was some of this on Not the Nine O'Clock News, as revealed in a much later retrospective. According to John Lloyd, the producer, when Rowan Atkinson took control of the VHS compilations, he essentially cut Pamela Stephenson out entirely, and when Lloyd questioned this said he just didn't think she was funny. Griff Rhys Jones has said that he felt it became "The Rowan Atkinson Show", which is why he and Mel Smith decided to move on to Alas Smith and Jones (although this doesn't seem to have been about Atkinson personally, as they were happy to work with him on other projects).
• Christopher Eccleston revealed in his memoir I Love the Bones of You that he didn't quite gel with his castmates on Our Friends in the North:
  • Eccleston described Gina McKee as a very private person who didn't socialise, to the extent that he got to know her character rather than her real self.
  • Mark Strong revealed that for some reason, Eccleston took an immediate dislike to him and when they weren't filming, the two didn't speak to each other throughout the whole year of shooting. Eccleston for his part stated that they mutually disliked each other, as their characters did and suspected that Strong was jealous of him.
  • Strong became close friends with Daniel Craig, which affected Eccleston's relationship with the latter. While they did interact, Eccleston suggested that Craig disliked him.
• Jeremy Gelbwaks, the original actor of youngest brother Chris on The Partridge Family, didn't get along with Danny Bonaduce (with the latter claiming years later on Behind the Music that he wasn't above kicking him before they would film a scene). He was replaced by Brian Forster, who got along fine with Danny.
• The set of Person of Interest was apparently a tense place stemming from Jim Caviezel's personal beliefs and behavior.
  • Caviezel often cornered crew members for minutes, without letting them get a word in or leave to do their work, with passionate rants espousing extreme right-wing views; the crew came to call it "getting sucked into the Cavortex". He also kept bringing up Adolf Hitler unprompted, even doing crude impressions by combing his hair down like Hitler's and holding a finger to his lip like a mustache. This habit made everyone so uncomfortable, Caviezel's agent had to tell him to cut it out.
  • He tried speaking to an Asian studio executive in mock Chinese. When confronted about this, he insisted he was actually speaking Chinese and excused his behavior by pointing out he'd adopted three children from China. In another incident, he suddenly started speaking to a White writer in mock German for no other reason than that they were both White men on set, causing further unease.
  • He had a tendency to injure guest stars and stunt performers by going off-script and manhandling people or landing hard blows without warning. Boker, the first dog who played Bear, had to be replaced with a different dog (with its chest painted to match), because Jim handled it so roughly that it went against its training and bit him.
  • He refused to shoot an episode where his character had to protect a gay couple, only relenting when told that the firefighters on 9/11 didn't care about such things when they ran into the Twin Towers. He apparently spent the entire shoot repeatedly comparing himself to those firefighters to anyone who'd listen. To avoid further disruption, scenes depicting homosexual romance were only shot when Caviezel was off set. Also LGBTQ+ members of the production kept their personal lives secret to avoid conflict.
  • Last but not least, he refused to let his character enter a romance with a Black woman because he personally disagrees with interracial relationships and made sure everyone knew. This offended actress Taraji P. Henson enough to leave the show altogether, necessitating her character getting killed off.
• Power Rangers:
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers originated a conflict between Austin St. John (Jason) and Jason David Frank (Tommy). Exact details vary, ranging from personality clashes to arguments over their personal martial arts credentials. The severity of the conflict has gone up and down, they seemed fine appearing with each other for various reunion episodes and publicity opportunities, but notably seemed to avoid doing convention panels together. This unfortunately went darker as a man was arrested at the Phoenix Comic-Con trying to carry weapons inside, claiming to be targeting Frank (among others) due to this rumored feud. Frank himself made a public statement afterward about the need for safety at the conventions as well as putting to rest the stories of the feud (indicating either it was exaggerated or the two of them decided to bury it).
  • This is the reported reason why David Yost (Billy) left the series during Power Rangers Zeo. After he came out as gay, the production crew would harass him with homophobic remarks behind the scenes and deliberately gave Billy multiple female Love Interests as a way of mocking him. Ultimately he couldn't take it any more, walked off set and never came back, forcing the writers to write him out. Years later he turned down the chance to cameo in Milestone Celebration series Power Rangers Megaforce, comparing it to an abusive former lover showing up and saying that they wanted to rekindle the relationship. Yost has repeatedly stressed that his castmates were not among those who harassed him and maintains good relationships with them to this day.
  • It was rumored that not all of the Power Rangers Wild Force cast got on with each other. According to Jessica Rey (Alyssa), Ricardo Medina, Jr. (Cole) was a bit full of himself, while Alyson Kiperman (Taylor) mostly kept to herself. Only Jack Guzman (Danny) and Phillip Jean-Marie (Max) got along with each other.
  • Invoked with In Space. Christopher Khayman Lee (Andros) was told to avoid his costars and act "like an asshole" towards them in the beginning to better sell the friction between their characters. As his character acclimated to the group, Lee was able to lighten up towards the other actors.
• Deliberately invoked, at least initially, by the creator of The Professionals - Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins were cast because they did not get on while working together on a previous project and he thought that would give the onscreen relationship between them the edge he wanted. While they worked out their differences in fairly short order and became friends offscreen they were good enough actors to keep the onscreen dynamic he wanted.
• The 1972-3 series The Protectors featured a lot of tension behind the scenes. Robert Vaughn wrote in his autobiography that he had problems with both Gerry Anderson and Lew Grade, though he had a better relationship with the latter. Anderson wrote in his memoir that acted like a Hollywood prima donna and refused to get along with the other actors. John Hough, directed many episodes, had many more problems with Vaughn's business partner, Sherwood Price, than with Vaughn himself.
• Craig Charles and Chris Barrie didn't get on initially while making Red Dwarf (at least partially because Barrie, the only member of the initial cast who was treated as a "real" actor, was being paid twice what everyone else was getting). Charles noted that it actually worked for the dynamic between Rimmer and Lister, although the tension between the two meant that the writers stopped doing the two-hander scenes set in the bunkroom that were a staple of the early series.
• It was rumoured that Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist didn't get on while making Remington Steele. They both admitted some level of personal conflict in press interviews during and since, attributing some of it to the stress of long working hours, while also maintaining that it did not damage their ability to work together.
• Richard Osman's House of Games: When James Acaster appeared on the show, he won the first three "days" of his week (actually all filmed in one day), but then appeared to completely stop trying for the last two shows. Acaster later revealed on Richard Herring's podcast his reason for giving up: the atmosphere between him and some of the other contestants had gotten genuinely contentious, with fellow contestant Anne Diamond even cornering him in the green room to berate him between tapings.
• Burt Reynolds left the series Riverboat after twenty episodes due to not getting on with co-star Darren McGavin or the executive producer.
• Roseanne had plenty of this:
  • It was allegedly the main reason for the departure of Sal Barone, the original D.J., after the pilot. He and Sara Gilbert didn't get along.
  • The show was notorious for Roseanne Barr constantly fighting with and belittling her writers, which was a problem from the very beginning. She resented the pilot writer and initial Showrunner Matt Williams being credited as the sole creator of the show despite it having been based on her "Domestic Goddess" stand-up persona (she felt that he should have been credited as the show's developer, with herself as the creator; as a compromise, she received a credit for "based on a character created by"). The two constantly butted heads over how her character was portrayed; she outright refused to say a line he wrote ("well, you're my equal in bed, but that's it"). Williams approached her co-stars John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf hoping to entice them to go along with a Retool in which Roseanne's character would be written out; they both supported Roseanne, and Williams, outflanked, left the show after the first season. (He would go on to co-create Home Improvement.) From then on, Roseanne made it clear that she was in charge, and often spoke poorly of her writers in particular and of television writing in general to anyone who would listen. Most writers and writer-producers who've worked on the show have little nice to say about the atmosphere in the writers' room, and even writers on other shows would make digs at her tyranny (on The Golden Girls, the Girls film a commercial in their kitchen and the director compares a cranky Rose to working on "The Roseanne Barr Show"). Most notably, Chuck Lorre had his first of many run-ins with prima-donna stars on this show before moving on to Grace Under Fire, Cybill, and Two and a Half Men in his later career.
  • It happened again with the show's 2018 revival, which was already contentious given not only Roseanne's history, but her recent embrace of far-right politics and conspiracy theories. The latter point ultimately became the show's undoing, with ABC canceling it after Roseanne made a particularly toxic set of tweets^note Specifically, she compared Valerie Jarrett, a former official in the Barack Obama administration and a Black woman, to an ape. — but not before head writer Wanda Sykes and actress Emma Kenney (who played Roseanne's granddaughter Harris) quit the show in disgust. The backstage drama even spread to other ABC shows, with black•ish creator Kenya Barris preparing to walk away from his show unless ABC fired Roseanne;^note Barris would leave black•ish after that season anyway, in large part due to ABC shelving an anti-Trump episode for the same reason they hired Roseanne: to woo viewers in conservative-leaning Middle America. after she was fired, he compared the situation to ABC "hiring a monster and then [asking] why the monster was killing villagers." ABC, not wanting to part with their highest-rated show but also knowing Roseanne was (once again) irreparably toxic to the crew, went The Hogan Family route by firing Roseanne and rebranding the show as The Conners, which was enough to placate Kenney and crewmembers to stay on the program.
• On RuPaul's Drag Race, most of the onscreen arguments and rivalries can be chalked up to Manipulative Editing and/or stress from long shooting hours, with a couple notable exceptions:
  • Season 1 finalist Rebecca Glasscock didn't get along with the other two finalists, Bebe Zahara Benet and Nina Flowers, who had bonded and hoped to work together again afterwards, but Rebecca made it very clear that she wasn't friends with either of them.
  • The Season 2 contestants have minced no words saying that they did not get along with season winner Tyra Sanchez, who was very much The Prima Donna during the season. When Tyra was crowned, runner-up Raven's farewell message was, "Watch the stars, because you'll never be one." This has only continued after the season; Tyra was banned from DragCon for threatening violence against Tatianna (among other antics too numerous to list here). When asked or criticized about her behavior, Tyra would always fall back on excuses of her social media being hacked, her words taken too seriously or out of context, and/or people simply hating her because she's Black. Fellow contestant Pandora Boxx summed up the cast's feelings when she tweeted, "Tyra Sanchez you were an asshole 8 years ago and you're an asshole now." To Tyra's credit, she has since apologized for her toxic behavior in the past and retired from drag.
  • Played with in Season 4 with Sharon Needles and Phi Phi O'Hara. The feud between them is now legendary, their "pet names" for each other being "Party City"^note An American chain of party supply stores that sells cheap Halloween costumes in October for Sharon and "Tired-Ass Showgirl" for Phi Phi. Even though their bickering was real at first, they later revealed that they eventually made amends offscreen (most likely during the "Frenemies" challenge when they had to work together), but they decided to keep pretending to be enemies on camera, knowing that it would make for good television. Unfortunately, the editing made Sharon seem like the more sympathetic of the two even though she gave as good as she got, which led to her becoming a fan favorite while Phi Phi became The Scrappy in a big way.
  • Invoked in Season 5 with Alyssa Edwards and Coco Montrese, who were rivals outside the show due to drama surrounding the Miss Gay America drag pageant. Despite their constant bickering during the season, when it came time for the ballet challenge, Coco chose to work with Alyssa because she respects that the latter is a choreographer, and their segment just happened to be a black swan and white swan squaring off. Fortunately, they were able to "bury the hatch" and were friends again by the time of All-Stars 2.
  • RuPaul himself experienced this in the 90's when he was a guest star on LL Cool J's sitcom In the House. The two did not get along due to LL's homophobia, to the point that LL threatened Ru with violence^note Ru, to his credit, took it all in stride and didn't provoke LL back. But as he stated in the interview where he revealed this altercation, he regretted not daring LL to hit him so he could sue the rapper to oblivion. What makes this sadly ironic is that in the episode, Ru played a high school friend of LL's character Marion who reveals that he's now a drag queen, and Marion learns to accept his friend's career choice. This means LL learned absolutely nothing from his own show. Their bad blood continues into the present day; Ru has said that he thinks LL's show Lip Sync Battle is a poor ripoff of Drag Race.
• Surprisingly enough, Seinfeld of all shows had this happen with a recurring guest star: In a 2015 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Jason Alexander revealed that the main cast had difficulty working with Heidi Swedberg, who played Susan Ross (George Costanza's one-time girlfriend/fiancée). Alexander, along with Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, complained to series creator Larry David that Swedberg didn't mesh with the main cast. This would lead to Susan getting written out of the show due to getting killed by licking very cheap toxic envelopes for her and George's wedding invitations. When Alexander's comments hit the airwaves, he (and the rest of the main cast) backtracked and apologized to Swedberg, saying that she was a fun person to work with. It was more a matter of different comedic sensibilities disrupting the rhythm of the cast than not liking her personally.
• On 7 Days (1998), Jonathan LaPaglia and Justina Vail, whose Belligerent Sexual Tension between their characters Frank Parker and Olga Vukavitch was one of the more popular plotlines, did not get along at all when the cameras weren't rolling. Vail actually quit before the end of Season 3, which was one of the contributing factors to UPN not renewing the show for a fourth season.
• It was long-rumoured, and eventually confirmed, that Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall didn't get on while making Sex and the City. Apparently, the two would ignore each other any time they weren’t filming scenes for the show. This was also the reason why both of the Sex and the City movies went through Development Hell — to do those movies would mean the cast working with each other again, which nobody involved wanted to do for anything less than a huge payday. For a long time after the franchise had ended, both tried to chalk up any tension between them to exhausting days on set. However, in February 2018, it became clear that the feud between them was quite real, and had never quite gone away, as Cattrall lashed out at Parker in an Instagram post after Cattrall's brother died.
  "Your continuous reaching out is a painful reminder of how cruel you really were then and now. Let me make this VERY clear. (If I haven't already) You are not my family. You are not my friend. So I'm writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your 'nice girl' persona."
  • Parker and Cattrall's animosity became such an Open Secret that it was parodied on RuPaul's Drag Race in an acting challenge based on the show. Cattrall also conspicuously refused to return for the announced Max revival of SATC.
• On July 18, 2018, Alice Wetterlund took to Twitter to accuse T.J. Miller of inappropriate, unprofessional behavior on the set of Silicon Valley, writing:
  I hope to not ruin it for you, but T.J. Miller was a bully and petulant brat.
• Soap Operas are rife with this. It's unclear how many stories are completely untrue, exaggerated, or downplayed.
  • In the mid-90's, The Bold and the Beautiful's Hunter Tylo (Taylor Hayes) and Kimberlin Brown (Sheila Carter) were once good friends (they and their husbands frequently hung out together, and are rumored to have even engaged in swinging) had a falling out when Kimberlin took Hunter's husband's side when the two separated, openly supporting him in the ensuing divorce and custody battle. Things escalated to the point that each woman had a bodyguard with them on set, claiming that the other had threatened them.
  • Rumours from unconfirmed sources claimed that Susan Lucci and Sarah Michelle Gellar couldn't stand each other while making All My Children — Lucci supposedly resented the fact that Gellar won a Daytime Emmy within two years on the show while she had yet to win after almost 25. However, in multiple interviews, Lucci outright denied these rumors and Gellar stated that the rumors blew everything way out of proportion.
  • General Hospital co-stars Anthony Geary and Genie Francis are rumored to have had phases of not getting along, despite playing one of the most popular couples in soap opera history, Luke and Laura. Neither actor was ever comfortable with what was supposed to be a rape storyline turning into a romance, and both were uncomfortable with the fame that was thrust upon them during the show's heyday. Francis has expressed frustration that the producers always credited Geary with the pairing's success and were willing to accommodate many of Geary's requests but not hers. Geary has called her his acting soul mate, but he has also been vocal about preferring Luke with characters other than Laura and not wanting Luke to be a family man. By the time Geary left the show, Luke and Laura did not even say goodbye onscreen.
• The Sonny & Cher Show: Sonny Bono and Cher divorced in 1975, but they attempted to keep their creative and professional partnership going with a relaunch of their Variety Show the following year. While it debuted to high ratings, it very quickly became obvious to anybody watching that the two of them still had a lot of residual bitterness, frequently engaging in awkward, insulting banter onscreen about their relationship. Cher's extravagant lifestyle and relationship with Gregg Allman didn't help matters either. Between the decline of the variety show genre in the late '70s and the fact that the show's two stars were a divorced couple who clearly hadn't put their issues behind them, ratings collapsed and the show barely lasted a year.
• The Sopranos:
  • Although both were crucial characters and presence of the show, it was widely rumored that Edie Falco and Lorraine Bracco did not get along. This apparently stemmed from the belief that the latter was jealous of the former's larger screentime and attention, despite her being James Gandolfini's onscreen wife.^note The original premise involved Tony and Melfi's sessions being the central crux of the show, but was de-emphasized as the show went on
  • Dane Curley (Justin Cifaretto) revealed on Reddit that Joe Pantoliano only found out that his character would be killed off at a read-through and he took the news badly:
    Joe Pantoliano, who portrayed my character's father Ralph Cifaretto, found out his character was being killed off the show in real time during the table read for our episode. Yeah, he wasn't happy! As soon as he realized he was getting whacked (maybe by reading a few pages ahead of where we were), he angrily shouted (at no one in particular, but presumably the writers) and stood up from the session. His phone went up to his ear so fast to call his agent, and he stormed off. As he did this, Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) yelled back some choice words to him: something like, "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!" The ruthlessness of showbusiness. Got to see the reality of this business well before my 14th birthday."
• Star Trek:
  • William Shatner was disliked by most of the cast of Star Trek: The Original Series, who accused him of stealing lines and screentime from them. Some saw it as an "us and them" situation (Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley on one side, and James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols^note When the two filmed their famous kiss, they both stated in their memoirs that keeping the scene unedited despite the racial tensions of the time was the only thing they ever agreed on and Walter Koenig on the other). Furthermore, Shatner was initially jealous of Nimoy's popularity.
    • Apparently, Shatner was oblivious to much of his co-stars' disdain, until he sat them down for interviews while working on the book Star Trek Memories, and many of them called him out over his glory-hogging, especially Nichelle Nichols. Shatner has at least somewhat mellowed out since then.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation had a notorious Troubled Production in its first few seasons, it wasn't until the third season that the production team stabilized and the cast really started to get along.
    • Denise Crosby was told up front that her character was not going to get much screentime (as they were attempting a replicate the Kirk, Spock and Bones Power Trio with Picard, Crusher and Data) and because her bridge station was directly behind the captain, she would spend all day on set with few lines and often just her legs in the frame. This encouraged her to request to be written out. She would also reveal in interviews years later that she did not get on with Gene Roddenberry, who was very upfront with her about the fact that her role was to be the show's sex appeal and little else. According to her, this was the reason why she was so abruptly killed off as Roddenberry had been very clear to her that if she left, there would be no coming back. Its noteworthy that her next appearance in the show would be after he had relinquished creative control due to ill-health.
    • Gates McFadden was vocal about the sexism and racism that turned up in the first season (especially "Code of Honor"), which she attributed to her time in a theater conservatory that encouraged such feedback. This did not help the already difficult writers' room. (They notoriously went through dozens of writers, many of whom were hired and fired in the same week.) Once Maurice Hurley took control for the second season, he demanded that she be fired.^note Hurley also had a crush on her. Depending on who you hear the story from, he either poured his heart out to her only for her to reject him, or essentially sexually harassed her. Either way there is another reason for her second-season absence Once Hurley left and Michael Piller took over in the third season, he convinced the execs and McFadden herself to return.
    • Patrick Stewart was uncertain of how successful the show would be, and did not settle into his apartment for years. He was also finicky about being a noted Shakespearean actor in a sci-fi show, and would berate the rest of the cast for joking around in between takes. Famously, when the cast said they were just having fun, his response was a very terse "And where in our contract does it say we are here to have 'fun'?". In another incident before the show aired, a documentary/interview crew was on set to help promote the show and the production allowed the interviewer to wear his costume, which he obviously did not appreciate. Stewart eventually lightened up and joined in on the jokes and pranks (to the point that he became notable as one of the cast's bigger pranksters), although the cast still gives him grief over the "fun" line.
    • Brent Spiner has mentioned, however, that Stewart began to loosen up as early as that same day, in the form of enthusiastically singing The Sound of Music during a scene set in a hilly environment.
    • Diana Muldaur left the show after only one season. Afterwards, she described the experience as "unhappy" and said, "Everybody was out for themselves. I don't think they were happy to have me there."^note Probably true, as she had been brought in to replace the aforementioned Gates McFadden, who came back in the following season Ironically, she has much fonder memories of her time on L.A. Law, which infamously ended with her character falling down an open elevator shaft.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had nothing too extensive, but the behind-the-scenes attitude was very dour.
    • It's been said that Avery Brooks, Armin Shimerman, and Marc Alaimo took their roles very seriously. (Brooks' temperament was partially due to Method Acting, Shimerman always fought against Ferengi as comic relief and Alaimo, despite technically being a guest star, would behave as though he was the lead.) During the first few years with TNG filming next to them, when people were actually talking and laughing, the producers knew that Marina Sirtis had wandered over to visit some friends. Upon joining the cast in the fourth season, Michael Dorn said it took him some time to get everyone to lighten up.
    • Alexander Siddig claimed that Avery Brooks took to him early on in the series, noting that they were both POC on a sci-fi show. This bond did not last, when Brooks terminated their friendship midway through the run and was hostile to him from then on. Siddig claims to not know what he'd done.^note The difference may have been ideological: Siddig is on record saying that Bashir just happening to be of North African descent and that being wholly incidental to his character was enough of a powerful statement for him in terms of racial progressivism. (He also changed his stage name from the very Arabic "Siddig El Fadil" to the European "Alexander" partway through the show's run.) Brooks, on the other hand, grew increasingly vocal about addressing Benjamin Sisko's African-American heritage in-story, from directing the acclaimed episode "Far Beyond the Stars" to adding in a line denouncing the inherent racism of 20th century Las Vegas and convincing the writers to change the show's ending as it looked like Sisko was abandoning his pregnant wife. Brooks allegedly was difficult to work with as a director as well as a cast member, and only a few of the regular cast would consider him a friend.
    • Many years later, in William Shatner's The Captains documentary, Brooks (alone among the captains - by contrast, Kate Mulgrew in particular has a very good rapport with Shatner) is unresponsive and evasive toward Shatner's line of questioning, frequently trying to change the subject by playing music. Shatner plays this off as Brooks being something of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander but it's clearly not good faith interview conduct.
    • Brooks declined to be interviewed altogether for the What We Left Behind documentary, the only major cast member to do so (though according to Ira Steven Behr, he did have input behind the scenes). He has also made it clear that he has no intention to reprise his role despite Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, and Scott Bakula all agreeing to return to the franchise.
    • Terry Farrell was frustrated over not receiving the same amount of pay as her co-stars. When she finally demanded to be paid equally, producer Rick Berman fired her.
  • There was considerable tension between Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan on Star Trek: Voyager. Mulgrew resented the character of Seven of Nine, due to the fact that she was getting more focus than Janeway, who was meant to be the star. Mulgrew felt that having a sexy female character brought on for ratings undermined the show and her position as a feminist role model. This caused conflict, because the rest of cast and crew generally loved both actresses, with Garret Wang saying that it felt like your mom and your sister fighting. Mulgrew has since expressed regret for her behavior, and she and Ryan have been seen to get along great at conventions.
• Succession: Brian Cox made no secret that he found Jeremy Strong to be a giant pain in the ass due to his insistence on Method Acting. There was a level of respect there, though, as he was also quick to say that Strong was a gifted actor who didn't need to stay in character like he insisted.
• The cast of Taxi despised it whenever Andy Kaufman played Tony Clifton because Kaufman refused to break character and acted as boorishly as humanly possible to everyone. It got to the point where everyone banded together and threatened to revolt if Kaufman wasn't fired immediately. The producers managed to come up with a compromise where they called Tony Clifton into a cast meeting, fired him, and had security guards physically throw him off the lot. This ensured that Kaufman couldn't bring the Clifton persona back onto the show and satisfied the rest of the cast enough to keep on working with Kaufman.
  • Conversely, Tony Danza has stated that Andy himself wasn't rude or hostile while working, despite his distaste for the show, but he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way with his complete detachment; even with his two-days-a-week stipulation, his absence forced the crew to often use a stand-in because he could never make rehearsal on time, and he'd stay separate from the other actors and meditate in the parking lot before filming. At one point Danza lost his patience, pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed him with foam just to get some kind of reaction — and Andy calmly stared at him as he did it.
  • Jeff Conaway personally despised Kaufman more than anyone. At the Golden Globes, he punched Kaufman in the face believing Andy thought he was better than the rest of his co-stars. After that, Kaufman never participated in any of the other cast-and-crew get-togethers ever again.
  • Conaway was also difficult to deal with; he believed his character should be the focal character of the show. (In Conaway's telling, this is what he was promised when he agreed to join the Taxi cast.) His drug addictions didn't help matters. Eventually, on an episode where Conaway's addictions rendered him unable to physically perform that week, the writers ressigned his lines to Tony Danza. Soon enough, the writers realized Conaway's character wasn't really necessary — and Danza was much easier to deal with. Conaway was soon gone from the show, and no-one from the cast (or crew) was advocating for his reinstatement.
• That '70s Show:
  • While Ashton Kutcher (Michael Kelso) and Mila Kunis (Jackie Burkhart) would eventually get married, they did not get along when they first started working together, and took some time to warm up to one another. As Kunis would later tell Glamour magazine in 2016:
    There's nothing we don't know about each other because we've known each other for so long: the ugly, the bad, the good. We went through a period where I thought he was crazy. At the height of his career, I was like, "Ugh, I don't like you. I don't even know you anymore. You think you're such hot s**t."
  • While nobody involved has ever confirmed it, it's widely believed that Topher Grace, who played the protagonist Eric Forman, did not get along with his castmates, and that this played a role in his departure from the show at the end of season seven. At the very least, he was not part of the clique that his male co-stars Kutcher, Danny Masterson, and Wilmer Valderrama formed among themselves, he was the one person in the show's cast who Kutcher never pranked for his show Punk'd, and he was one of three main cast members (the others being Debra Jo Rupp and Kurtwood Smith, who played the parents Kitty and Red Forman) who did not show up for a cast reunion in 2016 on the set of Kutcher and Masterson's show The Ranch. One version of the story claims that Grace was standoffish, difficult to work with, and thought he was too good for the show, while the other claims that he was instead put off by both the hard-partying lifestyles of his male co-stars and the prominence of the Church of Scientology on set, with Masterson (a second-generation Scientologist) and Laura Prepon (who joined the Church while dating Masterson's brother Christopher) both being members at the time and the rest of the cast also associating with it, including appearances at fundraisers put on by the Church. Grace's attitude was viewed in a new light after Masterson was convicted of rape in 2023, suggesting that Grace had very good reason why he never wanted to go partying with the boys after filming. The revelation that Kutcher and Kunis had written letters to the judge on the case defending Masterson only bolstered this.
• The short-lived ABC sitcom Thea had star Thea Vidale and her on-screen daughter, Brandy, not get along. Although the reasons for the beef remain murky, depending on whom you believe, it was either because the veteran comedienne was envious of the up-and-coming singer and actress or it was because Brandy was something of a brat on the set, not in any way helped by the presence of her mother/manager Sonja.
• In Three's Company, Suzanne Somers made a demand for a pay increase to match John Ritter, even though he was always the clear star while she and Joyce DeWitt were supporting characters. This was intended as a strategic move but caused so much friction during the fifth season that the producers gradually wrote her out of the set via a phone call Framing Device to match the terms of her current contract, and then wrote her out entirely at the end of the season. Her plan caused considerable harm to her career and ruined her relationships with Ritter and DeWitt, not speaking to them for over 30 years. However, she was able to make up with Ritter before his untimely 2003 death, and made up with DeWitt several years afterwards.
• Till Death Us Do Part:
  • Warren Mitchell and Anthony Booth hated each other just as their characters did.
  • Writer Johnny Speight fell out with The BBC during Series 3; Speight was furious that his scripts were being censored and aired Out of Order, whereas the Beeb were fed up with receiving late scripts.
• In 1980, in response to The Tonight Show being shortened from ninety minutes to sixty, NBC decided to Retool the following (expanded) program, Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, by having Today entertainment correspondent Rona Barrett co-anchor with Snyder. The two notoriously did not get along — Snyder resented how Barrett's fluffy infotainment segments clashed with the low-key interview style Tomorrow was known for, while Barrett regarded Snyder as a sexist who regularly mistreated her behind the scenes; she also chafed at how Snyder relegated her segment to the last thirty minutes of the show (at about 1:30 a.m.) each night. By June of 1981, with ratings for the program failing, Barrett had had enough and announced her departure. Tomorrow 's fortunes never recovered and the program was cancelled in December 1981. When asked whether Snyder or Barrett was more responsible for the failure, an anonymous NBC executive was quoted as replying, "That's like asking if you'd rather die of a heart attack or cancer."
• The chemistry between Two Fat Ladies stars Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright did not continue at all when the cameras stopped rolling. Both women were strong-willed and difficult; Paterson has been described as bitter and insulting, and while Dickson-Wright was a bit more amiable, she was possessed with a volatile temper (crew members nicknamed her "Krakatoa"). The animosity between them was so pronounced that they stayed in separate hotels during filming. Clarissa was also put off by Jennifer's on-set smoking and drinking (particularly the latter, as Clarissa was a recovering alcoholic). Although the animosity between the two was frequently reported in the tabloids, Dickson-Wright (who survived Paterson, whose death ended the show's production, by 15 years) consistently denied it as long as she was alive, going so far as to claim she had bought a tin of caviar for her "friend" but wasn't able to visit her in hospital before she died (and then eating it herself in tribute to her). At Paterson's lavish and well-attended funeral service^note her uncle was gentiluomo to Cardinal Hume, the head of the Catholic Church in England, it was noted that Dickson-Wright was carefully seated in the third row, not so far back that it would be perceived as a snub, but not up front either (which Paterson was said to have been firmly against).
• One episode of the 1980s Sitcom Up the Elephant and Round the Castle opens with Jim Davidson getting mugged. Davidson was reportedly so unpopular with the crew that they had a whip-round for the actor playing the mugger to hit him for real. The actor, needing the money, agreed and did so. Davidson was furious and vowed that the actor would never work in show business again. That young actor was David Thewlis.
• Nina Dobrev admitted that she and The Vampire Diaries co-star Paul Wesley "despised each other" their first few months of shooting, which was ironic because they were playing love interests. They smoothed it out sooner than later.
• The first season or two of Webster were marked by this as creators, co-stars and co-producers Susan Clark and Alex Karras feuded, sometimes with each other but more often with Paramount and ABC, both of whom had reneged on early promises that the show's storylines would focus on all three of its main characters in favor of all Webster all the time, trying to capitalize on child star Emmanuel Lewis's sudden fame. While Lewis was often quickly hustled off set when the shouting started, he heard enough of it to start internalizing and believing it was his fault. By the third season, everyone's differences had been worked out and they got along for the rest of the series' run.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Tensions between Lynda Carter and Lyle Waggoner grew to the point that as the series went on they appeared in fewer and fewer scenes together. So that Waggoner's character would have more activity on the show, producers brought in S. Pearl Sharp to play fellow IADC agent Eve. Waggoner was to be completely written out of the show as in the last episode of the series Diana is relocated to the Los Angeles bureau of IADC. In recent interviews, Lynda Carter has denied any tension existed.
  • Debra Winger didn't like working with Carter, but Lynda said that they didn't have any problems and was like a big sister to her.
• In the UK variety series The Word, hosts Terry Christian and Mark Lamarr humorously traded insults on-camera. In reality, they didn't get on at all. One producer confirmed that they almost came to blows in the green room.
• According to Bill Davis, things were never happy around The X-Files lot due to David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's open warfare. (Duchovny took to the press to make fun of his hotheaded co-star, going so far to "protest" that her character won more fights than he did!). Money was an issue here as well; Gillian complained that the disparity between her and Duchovny's incomes was sexist and unfair, especially given the fact that she'd become such a major draw for the series. Years after the show ended, with the actors having become friends and all, they said part of the animosity was exhaustion from enduring long shoots together, summing up that production "made monsters out of us".
• Yellowstone is a show about larger-than-life modern-day cowboys butting heads whose success made it the center of a vast Shared Universe, so it was perhaps only natural that, as this article by Aja Romano for Vox lays out, the show wound up dominated by the two clashing egos at its center that threatened to derail production in its fifth season, those of its Show Runner Taylor Sheridan and its leading man Kevin Costner.
  • Costner had a reputation as an exacting, temperamental prima donna going back to The '90s, and he brought that reputation with him to the set of Yellowstone, where he and his people reportedly alienated Sheridan, the show's crew, and the rest of the cast. Once the show became a breakout hit and the anchor of the Paramount Network, Costner's demands grew in accordance with the show's ratings, including short production windows and compensation for promotion days on top of his considerable paycheck (which hit $1.2 million per episode by Season 5). Costner coming down with COVID during production on the second half of season five only made the delays worse, as instead of extending his shoot days to accommodate his recovery, he decided that the time he spent in quarantine was part of his shoot days and left once they ended, forcing months of delays at considerable expense.
  • Sheridan, for his part, developed a reputation for Schedule Slip and Attention Deficit Creator Disorder once Yellowstone became a hit and made him one of the most in-demand show runners in Hollywood, causing many of his scripts to come in late. This was a problem on a show where, right from the start, he demanded considerable creative freedom to the point that the main role of the executives above him was to supply him with the show's budget. Reportedly, he grew an ego of his own to match that of his star, with Costner growing increasingly concerned with the show's creative direction only to be told by Sheridan to "stick to acting" and not question his creative decisions even though Costner, like Sheridan, was also an executive producer on the show. According to the same reports, Costner was ready to begin production on the second half of season five in December 2022 or January 2023, but Sheridan, overburdened working on both the show's spinoffs and various other projects, didn't have the scripts ready.
  • Things came to a head at PaleyFest in April 2023, when neither Sheridan, Costner, nor any of the show's other stars showed up to a planned panel, leading the fans in attendance to start booing. This was the point when the backstage drama around the show spilled out into the open and started raising serious questions about whether the fifth season would be its last. Even though the first half of season five aired its final episode on January 1, as of this writing production on the second half remains stalled, with cast members offering only non-committal promises that it would start later this year once Costner and Sheridan worked out their feud.
• Alexa Nikolas (Nicole) left Zoey 101 halfway through its four-season run after some uncomfortable experiences on set. At the time, she refused to talk about it, but has since been very open about her experience in recent years, claiming that she was bullied for much of her time on the show by both the cast and crew.
  • When the show first began, Alexa claims series star Jamie Lynn Spears (younger sister of Britney) refused to associate with her off-camera, despite the two playing best friends on the show. Alexa accepted this at first, but then noticed that Jamie Lynn did get along very well with castmate Kristin Herrera (Dana), and the two would frequently hang out off set and rarely include Alexa. Once the rest of the cast discovered this dynamic, they began forming a clique, with Alexa being excluded from nearly all off-set activities. She also recalls having lunch alone in her trailer because nobody else would sit with her, and that others would call her an "alien" because of her bubbly personality. The cast reportedly made fun of her for smiling too much. However, Alexa claims Sean Flynn (Chase) was nice to her most of the time, and most of her few positive memories from the set were with him.
  • While filming the episode "Little Beach Party", which was mostly filmed on location at a deserted beach, Alexa claims that she was positioned behind large rocks with Kristin Herrera, and the two were supposed to come running out from behind them. Right before the scene began shooting, Alexa claims Kristin physically assaulted her. Kristin denied this and blocked fans online who inquired her about it. After this and other incidents, Alexa's mother tried to get the show's staff to intervene and stop the bullying, but they instead told her that her then-12-year-old daughter needed to "grow up" and to "be professional". Following the filming of this episode, which was the last of Season 1, Paul Butcher (Dustin) began passing out invitations to the season wrap party. Alexa watched him do so and eagerly anticipated hers, but Paul instead shook his head at Alexa and ran away while laughing at her, causing her to break down in tears. Paul later claimed that it was not his party and he was not in charge of the guest list, and that he would not have excluded her if he was.
  • Going into Season 2, Alexa and her castmates learned that Kristin would not be returning. Longtime rumors claim that it was because she looked too old for her character, but Alexa believes it was due to the assault behind the beach rocks. However, the show gained a new cast member: Victoria Justice, who already knew Alexa. Alexa was initially thrilled that she finally had a friend on the show, and finally felt "safe", despite Jamie Lynn still refusing to associate with her (and, by association, Victoria). With Kristin gone, the bullying mostly stopped. However, one day, Alexa and Victoria had a small disagreement about a boy, and the next day on set, Alexa found Jamie Lynn and Victoria whispering to each other and laughing at her, which once again led to daily bullying and the staff doing nothing to stop it.
  • The final straw for Alexa was a traumatizing and unethical incident that happened during the filming of the episode "Spring Break-Up", the last episode of Season 2 in production order (but not the last to air). Alexa's mother was approached by producer Ian Jordan (who was close friends with the Spears family) for permission to escort her daughter to the makeup and hair trailer (a policy for taking minors anywhere on set without their guardian), which she approved. On the way there, Jordan violated set policy and diverted the destination to Jamie Lynn's trailer, telling Alexa, "Jamie and Britney want to talk to you." Alexa thought this meant that Jamie Lynn wanted to settle her differences with her, though this was far from the case. Alexa entered the trailer, saw Jamie Lynn run to the back, and noticed that Jordan abandoned her. Britney then came out, locked the door, and began berating Alexa and threatening to end her acting career, reportedly calling her an "evil little girl". Alexa was so traumatized she was in the fetal position, and ran back to her own trailer so distraught that she was vomiting and couldn't speak coherently when her mother asked what happened. Mrs. Nikolas called for series creator Dan Schneider, who showed up along with two Nickelodeon executives asking, "What now, Alexa?" Alexa explained the situation, but Schneider was impatient, as they had one more scene to shoot, and they were running out of daylight (much of the episode was filmed outdoors). Schneider said that they would discuss the situation at another time, gave Alexa her wrap gift early (a portable DVD player), hoping it would make her feel better (it didn't), and forced her to go back to the set. Alexa held back tears as Jamie Lynn and Victoria teased her more and shot her with water guns used in the scene.
  • Following the Britney incident, Alexa and her mother went to the Nickelodeon offices to have a meeting with Schneider and other Nick and Viacom executives, including VP of Talent, Sharon Lieblein, who asked her, "Why are you always crying?". Alexa claims she was forced to enter the room alone (suggesting that she wouldn't be able to comfortably tell her side with her mother hovering over her), and was belittled by Schneider, who told her, "The show is not called Nicole 101." He also agreed with Britney's alleged remarks that Alexa should not be working in the acting industry, and that she just needs to deal with whatever attitude Jamie Lynn shows towards her, since she's the star. Alexa tearfully said, "I don't want anyone to not like me.", to which Schneider responded by yelling, "No one likes you!" This sent Alexa running out of the room, sobbing. Her mother demanded that she be released from her contract. At first, Nickelodeon refused, then eventually relented, but banned her from all future Kids Choice Awards. Nicole was Put on a Bus after Season 2, and she was even left out of the opening credits of the in-universe TV show she and the rest of the cast were piloting in the "Spring Break-Up" episode.
  • In 2019, most of the cast, including recurring members, got together with Schneider for a reunion dinner, apparently to discuss a possible reboot. Alexa saw photos on castmate Christopher Massey's Instagram (one of the only cast members she remained in any contact with) and was not having it. She called them out on still excluding her even in adulthood, and soon began publicly posting about just how traumatizing her experience on Zoey was. She later revealed that Schneider's lawyers even tried contacting her to reach "an agreement" to stop discussing it publicly, but she refused. A few days after the reunion, Alexa did a lengthy Instagram livestream going into full detail of her experiences, and also mentioned how none of her castmates have responded to her attempts to reach out.
  • A while later, Jamie Lynn Spears seemingly wanted to make amends with Alexa, assuring her that she would be included in any plans for a reboot, and even sending her gifts for her then-newborn baby. However, Jamie Lynn would later change her mind. In her 2022 memoir Things I Should Have Said, responded to Alexa by accusing her of having started their feud by spreading nasty rumors about her on set, and then accusing her of bullying years later as a bid for attention — accusations that met a furious response from Alexa, who accused Jamie Lynn of "lying up a storm" and Playing the Victim Card. Notably, due to Britney's concurrent family conflict with Jamie Lynn, she publicly apologized for what she did to Alexa and took her side in the feud, calling Jamie Lynn "scum" and a liar. Jamie Lynn even tried to send a copy of the book to Alexa as another "gift" shortly before Alexa demanded that she never contact her again.
  • Christopher Massey, who remained on good terms with both Alexa and Jamie Lynn, denied Alexa's allegations and said there was "definitely no bullying" on the set. Alexa immediately disputed this, and claimed that, while Christopher himself didn't participate in any bullying, his mother witnessed it and even comforted her at times; this argument quickly ended their friendship.
  • Alexa has also described Nickelodeon in general as a nightmare of a company to work for, and said that she did not feel safe working around Schneider. In 2022, she accused Schneider of creepy sexual behavior towards her and her female castmates on set, sitting in the changing room on the other side of a curtain while she got dressed and then asking the wardrobe artist for Polaroids of her, behavior that only realized was creepy when she worked on Mad Men and experienced nothing of the sort. Her experience led her to found the activist group Eat Predators protesting sexual abuse of child stars in the entertainment industry.
  • Matthew Underwood (Logan) denies all of Alexa's allegations and accused her of being a "diva" trying to built excitement, behavior he also accused her of showing while doing the show. Matthew also defended the various allegations against Dan Schneider (attributing his many foot jokes as being lazy writing rather than a possible fetish), and claims that Alexa tried to spread a rumor around the set that Jamie Lynn had lice, one of multiple mean rumors that Jamie Lynn corroborated in her memoir. He also stated that he, along with Sean and Christopher, went to great efforts to make sure Alexa felt "included" on set. Alexa vehemently denies spreading or hearing any rumors of anyone having lice, along with Matthew showing any effort of making her feel included (she did agree that Sean was good about that, and Christopher to a lesser extent).

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