The 12 Juiciest Celebrity Grudges

We all have our grudges. Maybe you still harbor one against a middle-school bully, or maybe there’s a friend of a friend who never Venmo-ed after you graciously covered a very expensive group-dinner bill. Sometimes we hold grudges against people we don’t even know: the influencer who gave out terrible parenting advice or the singer who’s always late to their own concerts. Even if they’re against a public figure, grudges, for most of us, are personal, private, and rarely revealed to anyone outside our most trusted inner circle.

Among celebrities, however, grudges are harder to hide, especially if the person they hold the grudge against is also famous, and more so if the two are in the same industry. Inevitably, someone will ask, unwittingly or not, about the person whose downfall the celebrity in question is hoping for. In today’s atmosphere of heavy media training and PR-friendly canned responses, candid hater energy is on the decline. But as Kendrick Lamar’s banner year of accolades for ‘Not Like Us’ demonstrates, being a hater can still pay off. A nemesis, secret or open, can motivate you in a way your friends just can’t. There’s something deliciously powerful about holding a grudge; it’s surpassed only by the delight we can get from hearing about and carefully dissecting someone else’s — particularly if all involved happen to be famous.

But what is a grudge, exactly? Definitions vary, but personally, I think a grudge has two essential qualities:

Below are our favorite 12 celebrity grudges over the years, from the Old Hollywood era to the latest season of Traitors.

Elton John and Madonna

At the heights of their respective careers, there doesn’t seem to have been a problem. A video of the two backstage at the 1995 Brit Awards shows Madonna and Elton John in positive and playful spirits. But by 2002, the good vibes had soured: In a now-unavailable Sky News interview cited by CBS News, John reportedly criticized Madonna’s Bond theme, “Die Another Day,” telling the outlet, “It hasn’t got a tune. James Bond themes are usually very camp, and this one’s different … They should have gone for somebody like Lulu and Shirley Bassey, or maybe I’m in that league?”

It’s worth noting that, to this day, John has never created a Bond theme. It’s also worth noting that “Die Another Day” wasn’t one of Madonna’s most-played hits. A 2003 blog post from the Bond fan website MI6 Headquarters cites the same Sky News interview and references an Access Hollywood interview in which John elaborated on his thoughts, saying, “She’s probably killing me after that,” in reference to his previous comments. “Like a dagger through the heart. But you know what, she’s an amazing talent and great writer, so you know, I love her to death.”

Yet John continued to speak negatively about Madonna in public. During an acceptance speech at the 2004 Q Awards, he expressed frustration at a nomination she was up for the same night: “Madonna, best fuckin’ live act, fuck off,” he said. “Since when has lip-syncing been live? Anyone who lip-syncs in public onstage when you pay £75 to see them should be shot. That’s me off her Christmas-card list, but do I give a toss? No.”

While there were occasional attempts to make peace, John’s grudge against Madonna continued over the next decade and reignited in full force after a 2012 ABC News interview in which Madonna called Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” reductive. According to W magazine, John addressed the issue in his 2019 memoir, writing, “I used to make fun of [Madonna] for lip-syncing onstage, but the problem really started when she ran Gaga down on an American chat show.” The same year, he said on the Golden Globes red carpet that Madonna’s song “Masterpiece,” nominated in the same category as his duet with Lady Gaga, “Hello Hello,” had “no fucking chance” of winning the award. Alas, it did.

It does seem as though this long-held grudge may finally have dissipated: In 2023, John thanked Madonna on Instagram for her “advocacy and compassion” in the fight against AIDS after a performance of her song “Live to Tell” on her Celebration tour. Water under the bridge?

Mariah Carey and J.Lo

You may think it all started with Carey’s now-legendary “I don’t know her” response to a question about Lopez on the German TV program Taff, which began circulating widely after the clip was uploaded to YouTube in 2008 (based on Carey’s appearance in the video, the interview likely occurred around 2003) and eventually became a meme. In fact, however, the inciting incident had occurred a few years earlier.

Carey has said, in her memoir and elsewhere, that her first husband, Sony executive Tommy Mottola, who was 20 years older than she, was extremely controlling during their marriage; the pair divorced in 1998. Lopez worked with Mottola on her second album, J.Lo, which dropped in early 2001. According to an Entertainment Weekly report from 2002, producer Irv Gotti told XXL that he recorded Lopez’s duet with Ja Rule, remixing her song “I’m Real” as a favor to Mottola — right around the time Carey’s 2001 album Glitter, which featured another Ja Rule duet, “If We,” also produced by Gotti, came out. The original version of “I’m Real” used an obscure sample Carey had intended to use for the Glitter track “Loverboy.” Over the following year, Carey made shady comments about Lopez to journalists like Larry King and Vanessa Grigoriadis.

Ever since, Carey has insisted, again and again, that she simply doesn’t know Lopez. As is her right!

Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker

When these two were starring together on Sex and the City in the early aughts, nothing seemed outwardly amiss between them or among the cast generally. But after the show ended in 2004, Cattrall spoke candidly on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, according to Elle, about why. “I felt after six years it was time for all of us to participate in the financial windfall of Sex and the City,” she said. “When they didn’t seem keen on that, I thought it was time to move on.” Still, she did participate in the first SATC film four years later as well as the second in 2010. No further movies followed. In 2017, The Daily Mail accused Cattrall of “TORPEDO”-ing the third film, publishing a report that paints Cattrall as a diva who made unreasonable demands of the studio. In response, Cattrall tweeted that she simply didn’t want to do a third film and had said so in 2016.

After a 2017 New York Post article detailing the show’s “mean-girl culture” that had left Cattrall isolated from her castmates, she told Piers Morgan that she hadn’t been friends with any of them and that her decision not to do the third film was personal, according to Vulture. “This is where I take to task the people from Sex and the City and specifically Sarah Jessica Parker — in that I think she could have been nicer,” she said.

A lot of back-and-forth followed: Cattrall made public comments implying Parker had been cruel to her, and Parker continued to insist there was no beef on her end. Ultimately, the SATC spinoff series, And Just Like That …, was announced in 2020 without Cattrall’s involvement. She made a brief cameo in the show’s second-season finale but told the Today show’s Hoda and Jenna that it was “as far as I’m gonna go.” I think it’s safe to say this grudge won’t be going away.

Patti LuPone and Andrew Lloyd Webber

One of the most famously held grudges in the musical-theater world is Patti LuPone’s against Andrew Lloyd Webber. According to her memoir, cited in a 2018 interview in The Guardian, LuPone’s distaste for Lloyd Webber began the first time she worked with him, when she played the lead in his musical Evita, for which she won her first Tony in 1980 — and she had a pretty terrible time throughout the production.

Several years later, in 1993, LuPone originated the role of Norma Desmond in the West End production of Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard. According to People, she had been hired to play the role both in London and on Broadway, but during the London run, LuPone learned via the gossip columns that she had been replaced by Glenn Close — so she successfully sued Lloyd Webber for a million dollars, using the money to build a pool she called the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.

She also told The Guardian that despite her 2018 Grammys performance of Lloyd Webber’s “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from Evita, her grudge was ongoing: “We haven’t made up, no. No! What he did … The poor guy — it seems to me he wants the kind of critical success Stephen Sondheim has.” She doubled down in a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, calling Lloyd Webber “a narcissistic, insecure man.” But by the end of the year, Deadline reported she had attended the Sunset Boulevard revival starring Nicole Scherzinger and absolutely loved it. In a voice message for journalist Frank DiLella, LuPone said, “Now, I went in with trepidation because I have strong feelings about the show, not what happened to me in the show, but the show, period. I loved this production. I thought Nicole and Tom [Francis] were stunning. I thought Nicole was unbelievable. She broke my heart. She is a force.”

Considering she didn’t mention Lloyd Webber in her rave review, it’s probably safe to assume she still hates his guts.

Martha Stewart and Ina Garten

Although the outward expression of this particular grudge is fairly recent, there’s a good chance it has been simmering ever since Martha Stewart was sentenced to prison 20 years ago. In a 2024 New Yorker profile, Ina Garten credited her fellow home and cooking connoisseur with helping to jump-start her career; the two first met when they both lived in East Hampton, and Stewart featured a write-up on Garten and her local gourmet-food shop, the Barefoot Contessa, in the first issue of Martha Stewart Living. They became friends, and Garten’s association with Stewart helped land Garten her first book deal. In 2017, a Time report indicated an ongoing friendship and good vibes between the two.

But Stewart, interviewed for the same New Yorker profile, wasn’t exactly complimentary; she told the magazine she had never cooked a recipe of Garten’s and denied the two had drifted apart once Stewart started spending more time at a new home in Bedford. Instead, Stewart said, “When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me. I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.”

For her part, when asked about the feud during a live interview with People posted to Instagram, Garten said, “Well, let’s just say her story isn’t exactly accurate. And that was 25 years ago. I think it’s time to let it go.”

Sally Struthers and Betty White

Sally Struthers, who rose to fame on Norman Lear’s All in the Family and later appeared on Gilmore Girls, took the opportunity to air some grievances this year when she was a guest on the podcast Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti. She spoke about negative experiences with Lear before going in on the widely adored Golden Girls star Betty White. Prefacing with an admission of White’s popularity, Struthers said, “I didn’t have such a great experience with her. Very passive-aggressive woman.” She went on to describe the affront that kept her grudge alive longer than White herself. She had been invited along with a few others to White’s house to discuss plans for a possible new game show. While there, White “asked her housekeeper to bring in a plate of whatever to us while we were all sitting and talking,” Struthers said. “The plate was set in the middle, and it was cookies, I think. So I reached for a cookie, and she said, in front of everyone, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dear. You don’t need a cookie.’ Totally fat-shamed me in front of the rest of the people in the room, and I thought, Gosh, that’s not nice.”

Vin Diesel and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson

This is one long-standing grudge that seems pretty mutual — but could finally be fizzling out. In many ways, Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson are similar: They are both muscular, bald, and stars of the Fast & Furious franchise, and they both appear to deeply value the concept of brotherhood. In other ways, though, these two are very different: Diesel was raised in the theater while Johnson started out in the world of professional wrestling. They also, it seems, have had some differing views on the Fast & Furious films. It all started in 2016, with a now-deleted Instagram post from Johnson calling out certain male co-stars, according to People.

“There’s no other franchise that gets my blood boiling more than this one,” Johnson explained. “My female co-stars are always amazing and I love ’em. My male co-stars, however, are a different story. Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chicken s- - - to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses … When you watch this movie next April and it seems like I’m not acting in some of these scenes and my blood is legit boiling — you’re right.”

From there, it didn’t seem to escalate — at first. Also according to People, Johnson and Diesel spoke privately about the conflict, and the next year, Diesel told USA Today that the pair were like family. “In my house, he’s Uncle Dwayne,” he said. But Johnson didn’t appear in 2021’s Fast & Furious 9, and that same year, Diesel told Men’s Health he had taken a “tough love” approach as a producer toward Johnson (he also used the word Fellini-esque, of which I’m personally very appreciative).

Johnson soon shot back in a Vanity Fair profile, revealing that (1) he had signed on to the eighth installment only under the condition that he wouldn’t have to interact with Diesel, and (2) responding directly with this quote: “One part of me feels like there’s no way I would dignify any of that bullshit with an answer. But here’s the truth. I’ve been around the block a lot of times. Unlike him, I did not come from the world of theater. And, you know, I came up differently and was raised differently. And I came from a completely different culture and environment. And I go into every project giving it my all. And if I feel that there’s some things that need to be squared away and handled and taken care of, then I do it. And it’s just that simple. So when I read that, just like everybody else, I laughed. I laughed hard. We all laughed. And somewhere I’m sure Fellini is laughing too.”

A few more public (and, I’m sure, private) exchanges followed, and after a 2023 cameo in the tenth Fast & Furious movie, Johnson announced that he was returning to the franchise — and that his character, Luke Hobbs, would get his very own spinoff. But things still seem … off. At the Golden Globes on January 5, Diesel came up to present the award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, starting his speech with a tense “Hey, Dwayne” and a smirk. Johnson was smiling when the cameras panned to him but quickly went straight-faced. Grudge vibes remain strong!

Chrishell Stause and Tom Sandoval

The events of Scandoval — wherein Vanderpump Rules cast member Tom Sandoval was caught cheating on his longtime girlfriend Ariana Madix with the couple’s castmate (and Madix’s friend) Raquel Leviss, all while the show was filming — absolutely rocked not only the Bravoverse but the entire reality-television ecosystem. It just so happens that Selling Sunset star Chrishell Stause is close friends with Madix. So when Stause and Sandoval both ended up in the cast for season three of Alan Cumming’s Traitors, her disdain for him was immediate and visceral. It has been a delight to watch Stause’s patience with Sandoval diminish over the season. Even post-filming, she told TMZ that he is “not my favorite,” and during an appearance on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, she admitted to leaving Sandoval out of Instagram photos promoting the show, explaining, “No, I don’t want him on my page. I hate him.” It’s refreshing to see a grudge held so openly.

Henry Winkler and Tom Hanks

You’d be hard-pressed to find two men in Hollywood with more collective goodwill, in both the industry and the public eye, than Henry Winkler and Tom Hanks. But for the past 30-plus years, the goodwill between themselves has apparently been minimal to nonexistent. Winkler first hinted at his long-held grudge against Hanks in a 2019 interview on Watch What Happens Live, telling Andy Cohen he had been fired from a film starring Hanks and even went a little Mariah Carey with it, saying, “I don’t even remember the title of that movie.”

Winkler shared the deeper roots of this grudge on a May 2024 episode of the podcast How to Fail With Elizabeth Day: In the late 1980s, Winkler got a call from the president of Walt Disney Studios asking him to direct the film Turner & Hooch with Hanks playing the lead alongside a dog co-star. “I did 11 weeks of preparation. I knew this dog, this bull mastiff. This slobbery dog and I became friends,” said Winkler. Of Hanks, he said, “The star did not become my friend.”

Apparently, as Winkler’s story goes, during a location-scouting trip to Carmel, California, Winkler was recognized by an excited fan and Hanks was not. Winkler lost the job soon after. “The director of photography, when I was fired 13 days into filming, said, ‘I knew that this was going to happen on that day in Carmel,’” Winkler said on the podcast.

Director Ron Howard, who has worked with both Hanks and Winkler and considers each a friend, told The Guardian their falling out was “disappointing” but described it in as neutral a manner as possible: “I’m friends with them both and both men felt compelled to come to talk to me about it. It was just one of those unfortunate things where they really had a working style that did not fit. I know it was painful for both of them and I was able to lend an ear, if not offer any solutions.”

In 2020, however, Winkler told TMZ, “I don’t have a feud with Tom Hanks. What everybody says and what is true are two different things.” He added that the two had seen each other at a Bruno Mars concert and taken a photo together. In 2022, he told Andy Cohen on SiriusXM’s “Radio Andy” that he had run into Hanks and wife, Rita Wilson, at an awards show right before the pandemic. “It’s all very cordial,” Winkler said. “One day, I’ll write the book.”

Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace

You’d think the two authors most likely to be found on the bookshelf of the most annoying guy you know would have gotten along, but no. Theirs was the kind of grudge that had Bret Easton Ellis writing an essay on his thoughts about David Foster Wallace nearly ten years after Wallace’s death. According to a Slate essay by book editor Gerald Howard, who worked with both authors, the grudge was present from the outset of Wallace’s career. Ellis, who had been dubbed a member of the literary Brat Pack, was starting to lose favor among critics just around the time Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, was published. “The reviews were pretty much all one could desire for a first novel, and a number of them drew a sharp distinction between Wallace’s hyperintelligent and maximalist approach and the work of the Brat Packers, who were already being set up for a critical flogging,” wrote Howard. “Bret Ellis being one of those writers on whom nothing is lost, these invidious comparisons would not have escaped his attention.”

Howard goes on to say that the title story of Wallace’s collection Girl With Curious Hair was, to him, “an obvious and expert parody of Bret Ellis’s affectless tone and subject matter.” There’s also the academic review Wallace wrote about the work of Ellis and his fellow Brat Packers, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” In it, his views on Ellis’s work were supremely negative, to say the least.

After D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, was published, Ellis responded with a series of headline-making tweets calling Wallace the most “tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer” of his generation. And when a movie based on that biography came out in 2015, Ellis wrote a Medium essay criticizing both it and the book, saying the film “completely ignores referencing the other Wallace: the contemptuous man, the sometime-contrarian, the asshole with an abusive side, the cruel critic — all the things some of us find interesting about him.”

Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia

Perhaps the most one-sided, obsessive grudge on this list is the writer Camille Paglia’s against Susan Sontag, who, for her part, took the Mariah Carey approach. When asked about Paglia in an old television clip that later went viral on Twitter, Sontag confirmed to the interviewer what she had apparently told Entertainment Weekly two weeks before: that she had never heard of her. It’s followed by a clip of Paglia’s response, in which she criticizes Sontag as “being passed by a younger rival” and says, “I am the Sontag of the ’90s.”

In a 1992 Entertainment Weekly article, Paglia claimed to have met Sontag in 1973 when, as an instructor at Bennington College, she invited Sontag to read there. And in her 1994 essay collection Vamps & Tramps, Paglia rehashed the whole thing, narrating how she rushed to shit-talk Sontag in gossip magazines and tabloids. “Few things in my career have given me more pleasure than the lightning speed with which I was able to counterattack on that occasion,” she wrote, in an essay titled “Sontag, Bloody Sontag.”

Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine

These sisters’ icy relationship was notorious in Hollywood, starting with a gossipy report on their rivalry in a 1942 issue of Life magazine. Even the inciting incident of the grudge that prompted their lifelong estrangement is in dispute. The basic facts are that Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine were born 15 months apart in Japan, where their British parents were living. Both are described — in that Life report, in a Vanity Fair profile of de Havilland, and in many other retellings — as having been sickly as children. Their mother moved with them to California when they were both toddlers, but their parents divorced, with their father marrying the family’s former maid in Japan. Their mother then married a man named George Fontaine, who was strict and abusive. Each sister left home when his abuse became intolerable; de Havilland started her acting career, while Fontaine went back to Japan. When she returned, her sibling was a rising star and Fontaine decided to become an actress herself.

What you need to know is that at almost every point of their near-centurylong feud, the sisters had differing opinions on what powered their grudge. De Havilland, the elder sister, didn’t like that Fontaine tried to become an actor after she herself had already staked her claim in Hollywood. As de Havilland told Vanity Fair, “I wanted Hollywood as my domain, and I wanted San Francisco society to be hers … ‘I want to do what you are doing’ was her mantra.” Fontaine disputed the origin of the drama in a 1978 People interview, claiming that she never wanted to “disgrace” de Havilland’s name and that her own stage name came at the behest of a fortune teller she met at a party hosted by actor Brian Aherne. The psychic also told Fontaine she would marry the party’s host, which she ultimately did, even though he was an ex of her sister’s.

Then came the Academy Awards drama. In 1942, both Fontaine and de Havilland were nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. In her memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine wrote about feeling “paralyzed” when she beat out her sister for the trophy. While Fontaine was alive, de Havilland rarely spoke negatively about her; she seldom mentioned Fontaine at all. When de Havilland won her first Oscar in 1946, Fontaine wrote in her memoir, she rebuffed her sister’s congratulations.

The two were on cordial but distant terms as their careers diverged. Fontaine continued in Hollywood, while de Havilland married Pierre Galante and moved to Paris in 1955. De Havilland said they stopped speaking after their mother’s funeral in 1975. She told People, “I wasn’t even invited to the memorial service. Of course, I went anyway.”

When Fontaine’s memoir was published in 1978, she went on a press tour, speaking to CBC among several other outlets. In this super-cut of clips from interviews in which she spoke about de Havilland, Fontaine’s personal theory about their relationship emerges: As she tells it, they were destined to be enemies from birth because their parents hadn’t properly introduced them. “I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood,” Fontaine told People.

De Havilland started speaking publicly about her sister only after Fontaine’s death in 2013. To USA Today in 2016, de Havilland said, “A feud implies continuing hostile conduct between two parties. I cannot think of a single instance wherein I initiated hostile behavior.” She described her own memories of their relationship as “multifaceted, varying from endearing to alienating,” but called her sister “Dragon Lady.”

The truth probably lies somewhere in between their two versions — but considering Fontaine died at age 96 and de Havilland lived to 104, at least we have some confirmation that holding a grudge probably won’t knock too many years off your life.