One of the stars of the rebooted “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie franchise says his experience left a lot to be desired.
Alan Ritchson, who played Raphael in the 2014 movie “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and 2016’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows”, tells Collider making the films was “the worst production experience I’ve ever had.”
“It made me hate life so much, so much. They were so bad to us and they broke so many promises,” he explains. “I said ‘no,’ I didn’t want to do it because I’m going to waste the best years of my career on something that nobody’s even going to know that I’m a part of.”
Paramount, the studio behind the movies, assured Ritchson he wouldn’t be “just a guy in a mask.”
“They’re like, ‘No, no, this is a whole new, live-action, one-to-one, you move, they move, you’re just as much a part of this as anybody else. When it comes time to get you out there, you’re going to be in every country in the world, premieres all over the place, we’re really going to get you out there,'” Ritchson says. The actor adds that he ended up accepting the part after the studio’s assurances along with “Shameless” star Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard and Pete Ploszek, and because he wanted to do a movie for his young son.
Ritchson claims the studio used Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performances as an example of how they would be promoting the “TMNT” actors.
“They were pointing to the guy in ‘Lord of the Rings’ and what it did for him. Not only would they refuse to allow us to talk to the press, to talk to people, we found out after the fact that they told people we were refusing interviews, which isn’t true,” he claims.
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The actor also alleges he and his fellow actors weren’t paid for “anything extra,” including overtime on the set.
“They wouldn’t let us in the cars to go home [from set]. The turtles. They wanted to get the crew out of there to get them off the clock. If they stayed, they had to pay them. If we stayed, they don’t,” he alleges. “We’re sitting on our backpacks in an empty car park.”
People reached out to Paramount who offered no comment on Ritchson’s claims, while reps for Fisher, Howard and Ploszek did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Now Ritchson has learned from his experiences making the movies, adding, “When I produce things now, I treat people with the respect that I want to be treated with, that I didn’t get on some of these projects.”
