Have you seen Slate’s Hollywood Career-o-Matic? This hilarious tool — if one of dubious accuracy — collates data from Rotten Tomatoes to assess who is a great actor, actress, or director based upon the Freshness ratings of their films. Its usefulness is questionable: analyzing the data in this way tells us that the best American actor of the last few decades is John Ratzenberger, whose film average 76.1 percent Fresh… but this is because he has “voiced a character in every Pixar movie to date.” No insult to Ratzenberger, but best American actor? That can’t be right.
Things get funnier — and perhaps more accurate — when we start talking about worsts. The actor nod, via this method, goes to Chuck Norris, about whom Slate notes:
Appearing in one bad film is a mistake. Appearing in dozens of bad films is a deliberate choice.
And the worst actress, by this measure, is Jennifer Love Hewitt, who
has the rare distinction of never having made a single “fresh” (above 60 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) film.
I can think of lots and lots of bad actors who deserve to be called the worst, and Norris and Hewitt would certainly be among them. But perhaps you disagree.
If Chuck Norris and Jennifer Love Hewitt aren’t the worst Hollywood actors, who are?
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