Superhero costumes look great onscreen, but oftentimes, they’re pretty uncomfortable to wear IRL.
Here are 19 actors who hated their superhero and villain costumes:
1.
Tom Holland’s MCU Spider-Man suit came with all kinds of problems. In 2021, he told The Graham Norton Show, he said, “I asked for a zip, and I didn’t get one…I remember them bragging about, they added in these fans that you could click, and it would supposedly cool me down. They worked once. I have these hot batteries in my helmet heating my head up… There’s a hole underneath the eye socket where we used to be able to feed a tube down, and I could drink without taking the suit off…because it takes a lot of time.”
2.
Before helping design her new Scarlet Witch costume for WandaVision, Elizabeth Olsen wished her outfit “would just not be a cleavage corset.”
3.
To play Mystique in X2, Rebecca Romjin spent hours in makeup every day. In 2003, she told Entertainment Weekly, “The first one, it was eight or nine hours every day just to get into costume. It’s a little less now. Still, there are four women who do it, and having them in my personal space for that many hours a day is crazy-making. You can go from being perfectly happy and having a nice time to just being, like, evil bitch woman: ‘If one more person stares at me, I’m gonna pull my eyes out!'”
4.
Similarly, Jennifer Lawrence didn’t like being covered in body paint to play Mystique from X-Men: First Class onwards. In 2015, she told Entertainment Weekly, “I love working with Bryan [Singer], and I love these movies. It’s just the paint.”
5.
For Oscar Isaac, playing Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse was “excruciating.” In 2018, he told GQ, “I didn’t know when I said yes that that was what was going to be happening. That I was going to be encased in glue, latex, and a 40-pound suit—that I had to wear a cooling mechanism at all times. I couldn’t move my head, ever.”
6.
Scarlett Johansson was worried about wearing her Black Widow costume for Avengers. In 2017, she told Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio, “Look at that thing. I mean, who wants to get into something like that? You just think, ‘Oh god, really? Couldn’t it have, like, I don’t know, some sort of a peplum skirt or something?’ This thing is like very: there you are. It was also everything it represented. The character was so beloved. She’s an iconic character. And I didn’t know how people were going to take it. What the hell was I doing in this franchise? It was daunting.”
7.
In Avengers, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki costume was hot and uncomfortable because it was “30 pounds of leather and metal.” The eight-pound helmet was especially miserable.
8.
In the 2021 documentary Val, Batman Forever actor Val Kilmer said, “Whatever boyhood excitement I had was crushed by the reality of the Batsuit. Yes, every boy wants to be Batman. They actually want to be him…not necessarily play him in a movie.”
9.
In 2017, Michelle Pfeiffer told The Hollywood Reporter that her Batman Returns Catwoman suit was “the most uncomfortable costume [she’s] ever been in.”
10.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger played Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, it took an 11-member team four hours to get him in costume every morning. The worst part of the costume was the LED light in his mouth because his “saliva would creep into the seams of this thing and attack the batteries, [then] the batteries would immediately start disintegrating and start putting out battery acid into Arnold’s mouth.”
11.
In Suicide Squad, Margot Robbie rationalized Harley Quinn’s outfits to herself because she was “wearing hot pants because they’re sparkly and fun [not because] she wanted guys to look at her ass.’
12.
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Paul Bettany’s Vision costume was “pretty painful, it’s uncomfortable.”
13.
In Captain America: Civil War, Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther costume was “blazing hot.”
14.
To film Green Lantern, Ryan Reynolds wore a mo-cap suit, and the actual super suit was added digitally in post-production. In 2010, he told GQ, “It’s made of actual woven misery.”
15.
To wear her Ajak costume in Eternals, Salma Hayek had to face her fears. In 2021, she told Variety, “I am claustrophobic. I was terrified of the costume. I was terrified. Because if I cannot move and it’s kind of thick… I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to be able to breathe. It’s going to drive me crazy.'”
16.
In Eternals, Barry Keoghan was uncomfortable in his cumbersome Druig costume. In 2021, he told HeyUGuys, “There was, like, three layers to it, and I complained every day about it.”
17.
During a 2020 New York Comic-Con panel, Smallville actor Laura Vandervoort confirmed that she wanted her Supergirl wardrobe to be less revealing. She said, “I did ask them to burn the wardrobe when I was done with the show.”
18.
Watchmen actor Malin Ackerman said that wearing Silk Spectre’s latex costumes was “an interesting process.” In 2009, she told Access Hollywood, “It’s literally like pulling an elastic band over your whole body. Then you let go and let it snap and then you gotta wear it for 16 hours.”
19.
And finally, in 2017, The Tick actor Peter Serafinowicz told Yahoo Entertainment, “I think one thing all superhero costumes have in common is that all actors who have to wear the superhero costumes hate wearing them. It looks good, so I suppose that is the important thing.”
