The 20 worst coworkers in movie history

Peter is the protagonist of Office Space, the anti-corporation cult comedy. He’s also a lousy coworker. When Peter stops doing his work, it’s not like it goes anywhere. Plus, he convinces his friends to get involved in his illegal “Superman 3” scheme, which could have gotten them arrested.

Ed seems like a nice guy. There’s probably a reason he hasn’t been fired from Good Burger. However, he’s also entirely incompetent, but also enthusiastic. That’s a dangerous combo in the fast food industry.

Played with contemptuous aplomb by Wayne Knight, Nedry is the true villain of Jurassic Park. We can’t blame the dinosaurs for just being dinosaurs, you know? Nedry, though, shuts down the park so he can escape with the dino DNA for a quick buck. It doesn’t work out for Dennis, who runs into a dilophosaurus on his way off the island.

As John Cusack’s Rob Gordon puts it in High Fidelity , his friends Barry and Dıck just kept showing up at his record shop, and eventually, he put them to work. Barry, played by Jack Black, is not exactly made for customer service. He will happily excoriate you for your musical choices, even if it costs the store a sale.

Hey, the movie is called Bad Teacher for a reason. Cameron Diaz is not doing right by her students, for starters, but she’s also a terrible coworker to the other teachers at the school. Elizabeth does poorly by just about everybody.

The leads are weak, or so complains Shelley “The Machine” Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross. Played by Jack Lemmon, Shelley’s best days are behind him, but he’s desperate for one more big score. So much so, spoiler alert: he is the one who stole the Glengarry leads, screwing over all his coworkers.

First, Nick is a pretty generic chauvinist dude in What Women Want . He’s a bad coworker in that sense already. Then, he gains the ability to hear what women are thinking, and, well, that doesn’t make for a great coworker either. Who wants a dude reading their thoughts at work? It doesn’t help, these days, that Mel Gibson plays Nick.

Criminals can be coworkers as well. Sometimes, it doesn’t go well. That’s definitely the case in Fargo. While Steve Buscemi’s Showalter seems like an annoying guy to deal with, it’s a truly bad coworker who murders you and feeds your body into a wood chipper. That is, of course, exactly what Grimsrud does.

Frances McDormand won an Oscar for Fargo, but Marge seemed like a great coworker. In another Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, McDormand plays a terrible coworker. The kind who manages to get multiple coworkers killed while remaining forever chipper.

No, not Ash from the Evil Dead films, though he does seem like a bad coworker at the ol’ S-Mart. We’re talking about Ash from Alien. You know, the android who decides to kill everybody on board the Nostromo to bring back the Xenomorph to the corporate overlords. Sure, Bruce Campbell’s Ash is annoying, but he saves his coworkers’ lives, where Ash the android ends them. Hail to the king, baby.

Even monsters have to deal with office politics. Mike and Sully are friends, and they have each other’s backs, but the same doesn’t hold true for Randall Boggs. No, Randall is Sully’s main rival, and he does whatever he can to undermine the big star at the Monsters, Inc. corporation.

Sometimes he’s a pilot, sometimes a doctor, and sometimes he’s working with the FBI. The problem is that, through it all, Frank is a conman. Catch Me If You Can follows Abagnale as he cons his way across the country and the world, and having a conman for a coworker is never a good thing.

All three main characters in the very good Broadcast News seem difficult to work with. Jane and Aaron are clearly good at their jobs and care deeply about journalism. Tom is the “pretty boy” anchor with some impostor syndrome. That makes him a more complex and interesting character, but it also gets to what makes him a bad coworker. As we learn in Broadcast News, Tom unethically reshot and re-edited parts of his well-received expose, going as far as to insert a shot of him crying that he shot after the fact.

Look, Whip is a great pilot. He rolled his plane and saved the day. The dude was also drunk and coked out of his mind when he did it. Flight is about a pilot who, while talented, has demons that make him a danger every time he gets behind the “wheel” of a plane.

Another Denzel Washington role. This one won him an Oscar. Washington's charisma stands out in Training Day , a movie that is pretty weak in many parts but wisely cast the two lead roles. Whip may have potentially killed his coworkers with his recklessness, but Alonzo actively hopes his new partner (Ethan Hawke) dies because it will get him out of a jam.

It took Phil evidently years to become a good enough person to get out of the time loop of Groundhog Day. That speaks to how lousy he was to people at first. Played iconically by Bill Murray, Phil is rude to Rita, Larry, and Ned Ryerson. OK, so we get being rude to Ned.

From the second we see Ellis snorting coke in an office other than his own at the Christmas party in Die Hard, you can peg him as a problem. Ellis thinks he is smart and suave enough to buddy up to Hans Gruber, and he is not. After selling out John McClane and endangering all his coworkers, Ellis gets shot for his efforts.

Nobody at the San Diego news station in Anchorman seems like a good coworker, and that includes Veronica Corningstone, to be honest. Brian, though, seems like the worst coworker. He’s brash and crude, but there’s also this: Sex Panther.

Obadiah is a bigwig at Stark Industries, but as far as Tony goes, he is a coworker. Obadiah also, you know, tried to get Tony killed, and then he became the first villain in the MCU, Iron Monger, in Iron Man. Yeah, he sounds like a bad coworker, even if he occasionally brings pizza.

Sports movies are common, and teammates are coworkers, so there had to be a representative there. We’re going with Roger Dorn, the smarmy third baseman played by Corbin Bernsen in Major League. Even when the other team members come together, Roger remains smug and disaffected. He refuses to risk his health by trying on the field, and he’s a third baseman! That’s a key defensive position!