You see it happening all the time – high profile stars that manage to get the role and spoil your favourite show. Or you see a trailer to a new movie and wonder why this person keeps getting roles. This is our list of most recent underperforming actors.

5.. Matthew McConaughey

You might remember this guy as a man who stole DiCaprio’s Oscar, when everyone was sure he will finally win it. On top of that, this year brought huge roles for McCounaghey. He stopped acting in cheesy films and using his cheeck dimples, and hey, the audience even formed a term McConaissance to commemorate this change. It’s funny how critics put as the start of this rejuvenation moment his role in Magic Mike and Dallas Buyers Club. Taking a shirt off and losing 50 pounds for a role means commitance, but surely we saw changes of appearance by greater names.

His performance in Interstellar has been marked by Guardian as ‘not leaving his comfort zone or diverting from his usual acting orbit trajectory’. After scoring a role for True detective, he admitted being pigeonholed in rom-com roles have resulted in a small paycheck but also not the greatest roles.  As great as his transformation might be, the cheesy scenes of chasing after Kate Hudson on a motorbike will not be forgotten.

4. Megan Fox

Fox is that sex symbol actress who out of all major awards out there, won Female Hottie award for Jennifer’s body and Transofrmers. She is a mixture of everyone written about here, rising to fame because of her figure but then kept getting roles due to her bad reputation. Michael Bay signed her off Transformers sequel, and since then they both held grudge against each other. Bay claimed that Fox has ‘a lot of growing up to do’, after she said that working with Michael bay is not about having an acting experience at all.

However, they reunited for a chance and awkwardly Bay made her a star role in TMNT, instead of the turtles. 5 years later and all the fuss is gone, she is in Bay’s movie again, and it is Fox-heavy. Business Insider gives it thumbs down as ‘when turtles come on screen, they are fantastic. But then camera pans to Fox, endlessly trying to get out from behind the rubble’. We get she is hot, but in the Hollywood world, you pass by millions of hot people on the street every day, who can bring the character more alive than by pouting and barely reading lines.

3.Jennifer Lopez

The last time I remember seeing a decent JLo movie was Enough in 2002. Before but also since then she has mostly been pushed into comedies like The Back-up plan and Monster in law, none of which made it big either critically or economically. The most recent trailer released is for an upcoming movie The boy next door, yet another psychological thriller, where we can almost certainly predict the ending will be similar to Enough. Her worst fail was movie Gigli with Ben Affleck, which became a box office bomb, with 54 million dollars spent on production, while earnings were only 7 million. Similar happened with An Unfinished Life, which was a commercial failure with a loss of 12 million in grossing.

The latest movie she starred in is Parker, which critics compared to her movie Out of Sight in 1998. Brace yourselves, as another repetition is likely to come, and JLo obviously isn’t too keen on staying only an entertainer, so we will be seeing her on the movie screens in the future.

1. Katherine Heigl

If you loathe the cases of models turning into actors, with their biggest hit off point being photoshoot for a men’s magazine, you will agree with me on this one. Her newest role is for the show State of affairs, which was expected to be her greatest comeback, but keeps getting less than stellar reviews. It strikes as odd she has been given a serious CIA analyst role, after all of her previous roles being in rom-com movies. It felt like she played the same person all throughout ’27 dresses’, ‘Life as we know it’ and ‘The ugly truth’, and this was too much of a wild card.

Her past roles and bad reputation after Grey’s anatomy and never returning to work with the same director makes it hard to believe directors still be willing to take chances. The show has been expected to flop, as Scandal and Madam Secretary, all shown now, also revolve around some presidential affair. But Heigl does add to the part of this being an suspense killer show, where according to Forbes, ‘audiences need to worry about State of affairs capability in the realm of emotional drama’. And if Heigl keeps her same persona role she’s been keeping up for years, we can expect reviews to hit the rock bottom.

1.Ben Affleck

Affleck is one of those guys who get stuck in your mind for bad performances such as in the films Gigli and Surviving Christmas, and then once you hope it’s all over, he appears in another overrated production – Gone girl. Since 2003 and his relationship with Jennifer Lopez, GQ has announced him ‘the world’s most over-exposed actor’. The saga continues, as he has been the name critics used the most this year. First, it was the announcement Affleck is to play Batman in 2016 sequel, which brought rage on Twitter, making hashtag #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck trending. NY Post said more than 10 000 people signed petitions on Change.org, making sure the public remembers previous movies where he was supposed to play superhero but failed.

Whenn it comes to Gone girl, you could say the fil portrays his relationship with press in mid-2000s, after break-up with Jennifer Lopez. Esquire drew parallels between him as Nick Dunne and Ben Affleck in 2000s, and claims ‘Gone Girl is secretly the story of Ben Affleck’s career’. You might think he is old news now, but this guy will land in another most controversial movie in no time, or you just have to wait until 2016 for another real disappointment.

Pictures: Fame Driven,Following the nerd, Ryan Seacrest, Hareetz, Variety

writes @ManicMaja