Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Actor Says Making Reboots Was 'the Worst Production Experience'
Filming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, one of its former stars has revealed.
In an interview with Collider Live!, actor Alan Ritchson, who portrayed Raphael, one of the turtles in the film, opened up about the making of the reboots, calling it “the worst production experience I’ve ever had.”
“It made me hate life so much, so much,” Ritchson said. “They were so bad to us and they broke so many promises. 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.”
Ritchson starred in 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. Paramount, the studio behind the reboots, had no comment.
The actor claims Paramount convinced him to star in the film and that he’d been promised 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 claims. “It was like, all right, obviously that always helps, getting to know other audiences in other countries internationally and I had a young boy at the time. I really wanted to do this for [him].”
He continued, “They were pointing to the guy in Lord of the Rings [Andy Serkis] 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.”
Ritchson starred in the films alongside Noel Fisher, Jeremy Howard and Pete Ploszek. Ritchson claims the four weren’t paid for “anything extra” including overtime.
“They wouldn’t let us in the cars to go home [from set],” Ritchson claims. “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. We’re sitting on our backpacks in an empty car park.”
Fisher, Howard and Ploszek’s representatives did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Ritchson did say he learned from the experience, saying, “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.”
