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Movies & TV News & Features

Breaking bad

Part of Spring Breakers’ appeal (at least as far as marketing is concerned) is its good-girls-gone-wild casting. (which, for some, amounts to maybe seeing Selena Gomez or Vanessa Hudgens topless). It’s part of a long history of movies that cast actors with squeaky-clean images as delinquents, badasses or (most commonly) hookers with hearts of gold.

Here are some of the more notable examples of good actors breaking bad.

1. Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster (2003): Culkin had already flipped his cute rascal persona in 1993, playing a pint-sized psychopath in The Good Son (opposite the future Frodo, Elijah Wood). But a decade later, after Culkin’s cuteness had morphed into a weird agelessness, Party Monster was the next level. Playing real-life club kid/promoter Michael Alig, Culkin indulged in drug abuse, cross-dressing and all kinds of other edgy behaviour designed to give his stagnating career a kick in the bum. It didn’t take.

2. Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy (1992): Pitched in VHS trailers as “a steamier, deadlier Hand That Rocks The Cradle,” erotic thriller Poison Ivy cast Barrymore – then still best known as “the kid from E.T.” – as a teenager trying to steal the life of her best friend (Sara Gilbert, aka Darlene in Roseanne). She even tries to seduce Tom Skerritt! Gross.

3. Donna Reed in From Here To Eternity (1953): Reed played Jimmy Stewart’s high school sweetie in It’s A Wonderful Life, but subtly alluring girl-next-door wiles don’t win Oscars. So she changed gears drastically for this 1953 military drama, winning best supporting actress as a sassy, self-confident working girl opposite Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift.

4. Zac Efron in The Paperboy (2012): In 2006, Efron was playing the lead in the Disney Channel’s High School Musical (opposite Spring Breakers’ Vanessa Hudgens, incidentally). By 2012, Nicole Kidman was peeing on him in Lee Daniels’s laughable The Paperboy. You can practically see Efron’s innocence wash off his body, into a pool of prop urine.

5. Lindsay Lohan in real life: What’s there to say, really? Lohan started out as a spunky child star in Calvin Klein Kids ads and a remake of The Parent Trap. Now she’s a meme about getting arrested.

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