Bird Box briefly made Danielle Macdonald one of the most hated people in the world
Audiences had very strong reactions to Danielle Macdonald in the 2018 Netflix horror thriller Bird Box
Aux News Danielle Macdonald
Bird Box, the post-apocalyptic horror thriller starring Sandra Bullock, was a sensation when it was released in 2018. It smashed viewership records, becoming the most-watched Netflix film ever until it was unseated by Red Notice. Today, it’s still the fourth most-watched Netflix movie of all time, with 157.4 million views, according to the streamer. Among its impressive stats is the fact that film is incredibly meme-able: a clip of Danielle Macdonald’s character Olympia running out of a window is a frequent favorite of stan Twitter, as The A.V. Club recently told the actor. But “I’m not on Twitter, so I didn’t really know that, to be honest,” Macdonald laughed.
But she does know that audiences had a strong reaction to Olympia. “So, Bird Box came out at the end of 2018. And I remember at the end of the year people had, like, ‘The Most Hated People of 2018,’ and it was my face next to Trump’s. I just remember that,” The Tourist actor said of social media posts. “And I was like, ‘Oh wow. People really, really hated my character.’ But it was really fun, I was like, ‘Hey, means you did a good job, people really responded to the movie.’ But I do remember that.”
Spoilers if you never got around to watching Bird Box, but “people hated my character because I let Tom Hollander in,” Macdonald explained. In the film, Macdonald and Bullock are part of a small group of survivors of an apocalypse wherein people are driven to suicide if they ever lay eyes on the mysterious entities that now haunt the world. Hollander’s character claims to have escaped another group of survivors who have gone insane from seeing the entities and now try to force others to look at the entities. Well, turns out, he was one of those insane guys, and he wreaks havoc on Bullock’s little found family, killing most of them.
Because Macdonald opened the door for Hollander, lots of viewers held a grudge against her, apparently. “[They’re] like, ‘You’re the reason he was able to murder everyone!’ I’m like, ‘Right, but I didn’t murder everyone.’ Yeah, people were very mad. Got a lot of hate for it!” She told The A.V. Club. “Oh, so many hate messages. Death threats, actually. I think they were fake, I hope, but yeah. And like, people on the street would come up to me and go like, ‘Oh, I hate you!’ And I was like, ‘Oh wow—right, right, because of the movie, because of the character.’”
As it happens, Macdonald also starred in the heartwarming young adult film Dumplin’, which Netflix released earlier the same month. “[So] I had people either seeing me and going ‘Ah!’ and hugging me because they were like, ‘That movie meant so much to me,’ or having people being like ‘Ah, I hate you!’ And I was like, ‘I feel like I’m in an alternate reality where I’m being torn in two opposite directions.’ And it was actually kind of crazy,” The Tourist star reminisced. “It was a wild time.”
Macdonald’s current series, The Tourist, is streaming now on Netflix.
28 Comments
But “I’m not on Twitter, so I didn’t really know that, to be honest,” MacDonald laughed.Always a good decision!
“But I am on The AV Club, to be honest,” MacDonald laughed. Then she cried a little.
If it’s any consolation to her, she was the best part of The Tourist. Well, her and the giant Icelandic assassin with the cowboy hat. But mostly her!
And Jamie Dornan in a towel.
Her deeply unpleasant boyfriend from the first season oddly becomes the best part of the second.
Every time he opened his mouth I braced myself for the worst words to come out of it, and he did not disappoint.
people on the street would come up to me and go like, ‘Oh, I hate you!’What the fuck is wrong with people.
“”People” like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust “people”, Jeremy.”
The way so many people develop real and severe animus for characters they watch on screens is one of the more unnerving aspects of humanity these days. I know the story of people freaking out the first time they saw a film of a train moving toward the audience is an urban legend, but I honestly feel like a significant percentage of these people would do just that if you erased all their knowledge of cameras and how they work and then showed them that film.
There’s also stuff like Bruce Dern getting people trying to kill him after he killed John Wayne in The Cowboys. This is nothing new.
It was on this very site, back in its pre-zombie days, that I first discovered that 1. when the tv character Rhoda got married in the 70’s people sent wedding gifts to CBS and 2. when the character divorced a year or two later, thousands of viewers angrily demanded the gifts back
Even back in the eighties, pregnant characters in British soap opera EastEnders would get sent tons of baby clothes by viewers. I think the show makers just donated them onwards. I assume it still happens, because, y’know, people.
I used to work at a magazine company in the 90s that had a TV Guide mag as part of its stable. People would ring the publishing company reception and ask to speak to a character from their favourite soap. Not the actor, the character.
There was a 1977 episode of All in the Family where someone attempts to rape Edith, and the actor who portrayed him got death threats for years. The guy who played Will’s dad on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air got a similar response.
He was just trying to get that lame-o out of his yard!
I’ve been reading about identical stories my entire life
Actors Who People Hated In Real Life Because Of The Villains They Played (ranker.com)
It’s fun to have strong reactions to characters! The problem is when it transfers to the real world.Example: I want to kill the character Negan, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan is hot as fuck. Most of us understand the difference.
I have a friend who was a producer on TWD and she said Morgan is about the nicest person she’s ever worked with, so Negan gave everyone major whiplash. She avoided being on-set for filming of his more horrifying scenes.
It’s not just these days. I hated Michael Rappaport for fucking years after Higher Learning (1995). I couldn’t stand to see his face. Then I liked him again in his Chappelle’s Show days. And then I hated him again because it turns out he’s a bit of a shitbird.Also, that’s what this kind of art is supposed to do? I have no doubt people had similar reactions to books and plays prior to the development of television an film. It’s supposed to evoke a strong reaction.
I don’t think it’s supposed to be so strong that you hate the creators. A Pavlovian aversion to a face after an outstanding performance, sure. But surely you understood that it was fiction and aren’t surprised that Rappaport is still alive and didn’t go to prison for killing people on a college campus. These people telling a stranger on the street that they hate her are borderline Annie Wilkes crazy.
Sure I obviously wasn’t sending him death threats lol. I took the “I hate you” on the street as in jest? Like “omg it’s you, I hate you hahaha.” It didn’t sound like she felt actually threatened by these interactions (certainly I wouldn’t be surprised if she felt threatened by the mailed threats). She felt surprised.So I don’t think it’s as bad as Yellowfoot makes it seems, or only for “these days.” There have always been fans who were nuts—remember Eminem’s song Stan? It’s always happened, and it’s a natural result of art that evokes strong emotions meeting people who were already a little bit or a lot crazy, and there have always been crazy folks. My point is not that it’s normal to send death threats to actors! My point is just that it’s not new to “these days.”
Confusing a character with the person playing him is how we got 8 years of hell and a good chance democracy will be over in the United States after November. Thanks, Mark Burnett!
I hear you, and at the same time I have automatically hated Paul Reiser in everything since 1986 when he played Burke in Aliens.
The only actors I really don’t like are Toby the dog and the one who plays the disaster demon in the insurance commercials. Toby is NOT a very good boy. How about a return of Joe Isuzu selling insurance? Take on the gecko or the nice guy who has seen a thing or two? But going after an actor playing a roll in which they are clearly swept up in another take that social media makes people nuts actually being swept up by people going nuts on social media? That’s nuts.
Is that some kind of weird SEO gibberish on the Twitter post?
Thank you – I was thinking the same thing! It was the first thing I noticed, and found it weird no one else commented on it.
That or someone had a stroke while posting it ..either way fucking gibberish.
I watched Lady Bird last week and it’s funny to
see that Danielle McDonald gets a single line in it. It’s not meant as a cameo,
she just hadn’t broken through as an actress yet. But the effect now is you get
taken out of the film a little, because she delivers the single line “Was it
you?” and then never appears again.