Lincoln, who starred on The Walking Dead from 2010 to 2018, refused to watch himself on the show.

Credit: Raymond Hall/GC Images

Richard Gadd

Baby Reindeer is one of the 10 most-viewed shows in Netflix history and technically show star and creator Richard Gadd accounts for one of them. He told Deadline that when the show hit Netflix in April, he hit play, but put his TV on mute so he would not have to watch.

“I loaded it up on Netflix, pressed play and muted the television because I thought, 'Maybe the algorithm will catch it,“ he explained. “I realized by about midday that there was no need to do that, because my phone was just exploding."

Gadd added that he hasn’t watched the show since it came out and he “probably never will.”

Hamlin earned three Golden Globe nominations during his five-season stint as attorney Michael Kuzak on L.A. Law from 1986 to 1991. However, he didn’t watch the show until decades later.

“I never saw it because at the time, my [then] wife [Laura Johnson] was always on another show on another network at the exact same time,” he revealed during a December 2023 appearance on Live With Kelly and Mark. “So, it was like, ‘Do we watch her show, do we watch my show?’ We went out to dinner instead. We didn’t have a VCR.”

Hamlin then shared that he’d recently begun watching the legal drama. 

"It’s amazing! It’s like a period show. There’s no computers in it. We’re using typewriters,” he said. “No cell phones. There’s a car phone in one scene. It’s like going back in time, and it works like crazy.”

In February 2022, the Grey's Anatomy star revealed that she hasn't actually watched many episodes of her long-running ABC series. "I haven't really seen most of them, I've watched only a handful," she said during an episode of her "Tell Me with Ellen Pompeo" podcast. "The few times I've directed, I went back and watched some old episodes."

The Massachusetts native explained that she likes to revisit older episodes when she directs so she can preserve some of the "spirit" from the series' first few seasons. "My intention is always to keep the spirit of the early days," she said. "That's really the hard work, is to try to keep that sort of DNA, which is hard but gives us a goal at least to strive for."

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Eric McCormack

The Will & Grace alum revealed in October 2021 that he never saw his hit 1993 Halloween movie, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, during which he played the dad of the Olsen twins’ characters' Kelly and Lynn Farmer.

“I'm going to this year. I'm going to go to my Hulu account and watch it finally,” McCormack told Entertainment Weekly when reflecting on the cult classic. “But no, I never have. It's hard to go back and see ... certain looks. And also, I was probably a year-and-a-half into television, so I was still trying to adapt my stage acting to the camera. Maybe I was terrified to go back and watch it.”

“I never watched any of the series,” Watson exclusively told Us in October 2021 of his hit series 7th Heaven. “I was so busy working all the time. All I remember is working crazy hours on that show because I was the only one of the kids on a show that was over 18. I was 21 when we did the pilot. So they could work me as long as they wanted to”.

The Michigan native continued: “Half the time I was talking to, like, pieces of tape on the wall that was supposed to be one of the other characters. And I'd be there until two o'clock in the morning. You know, I never had time to watch the show.”

The Harry Potter star, who played Harry’s BFF Ron Weasley in the franchise, surprised fans in February 2021 when he shared how many of the movies he’s actually watched. “I’ve probably seen the first three at the premieres, but after that, I stopped watching them,” the British actor told Variety at the time. “But now that I have a daughter, I will probably have to watch them with her.”

“The last movie I saw of mine was Crazy Rich Asians. It was watching that movie, after that experience, that I stopped watching anything,” Wu said during a February 2020 appearance on Live With Kelly and Ryan. “I didn’t watch my talk show appearances or Fresh Off the Boat or Hustlers. Just because I thought, you know, I want to focus on the present and not be self-critical and think too much, dwell too much on the past.”

The Girls alum told the New Yorker in October 2019 that he was “mortified” after seeing himself on the HBO show which is when he swore off watching himself on screen. “That’s when I was, like, I can’t watch myself in things. I certainly can’t watch this if we’re going to continue doing it,” he explained, noting he “went totally cold” when he felt obligated to attend the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere in 2015.

When it came to watch BlacKkKlansman, Driver agreed to attend a showing of the movie, but said he hid in the greenroom while it played. He later returned to the theater to take a bow.

“I never watched Dawson’s Creek. I didn’t watch it before I was on the show and I barely watched it after I was on the show, so I don’t have the same connection that other people have to it,” the actress, who played Audrey Liddell on the WB series from 2001 to 2003, told the Belfast Telegraph in July 2018. “Freaks And Geeks, I think, is ultimately the classic [out of my shows]. And then probably Cougar Town.”

After winning the Academy Award for Best Support Actor in Dallas Buyers Club, Leto conceded that he’d never watched his performance. "I can't hear that voice! I've never really heard very much of it and I've never watched the film," the 30 Seconds to Mars singer said during an August 2014 interview with the New York Times’ TimesTalks. "I will [watch it] at some point, I'm sure. But too soon!"

He added: "It can never live up to the expectations I would have of it now because it was such a beautiful experience and the response that it got was really wonderful."

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Andrew Lincoln

The English actor told Entertainment Weekly in August 2013 that he has multiple reasons as to why he never watched himself as Rick Grimes on The Walking Dead.

“The original reason is the fact that I don’t actually enjoy looking at myself,” he said at the time. “And also because of the directorial choices that possibly, because I’ve done it, make you go, ‘Oh, there’s a take that blah-blah-blah.’ But mainly because I did it for a while, I watched it, and it’s a self-conscious thing of watching myself and going, ‘Oh, I like it when I do that. That’s kind of cool.’ And then, ‘Oh, I don’t like it when I do that.’ And that defeats the object of what I want to do as an actor, which is to try and be in the role and not be self-conscious.”