Most celebrities respond to bad reviews by pretending they never read them. Kim Kardashian did something far more unusual: she let the reviews for All’s Fair get under her skin, carried the doubt onto her next film set, and then converted the whole experience into motivation. The result, by her own account on the Oct. 22 episode of The Kardashians, was the hardest she has ever worked on a single role — and a comedy performance she is determined will silence the doubters.
The film is The Fifth Wheel, directed by Eva Longoria and co-starring Brenda Song and Fortune Feimster. It arrived in Kardashian’s life as a compliment: her agent Brad Slater believed she was secretly funny and pushed comedy writer Paula Pell to build a project around her. But by the time cameras were ready to roll, the conversation around Kardashian the actress had turned sour, and she knew it.
From SKIMS Boardrooms to the Soundstage
Kardashian is no stranger to high-stakes launches. As the founder of SKIMS, she has grown a shapewear label into a global brand empire, and she has long been described as a fashion mogul who treats every red carpet — from the Met Gala on down — as a business opportunity. Acting, though, is the one arena where her fame could not guarantee a warm reception, and the All’s Fair reviews proved it in the most public way possible.
(Eva Rinaldi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))“I think coming off of such criticism for All’s Fair, I got insecure,” she confessed on the show. “I was like, ‘Do they want [me] out of the movie?’” The question hung over the production before it was ever answered. Kardashian offered to back out entirely — “I totally understand, I’ll fully back out, don’t worry” — rather than become the reason a film she believed in got dragged through another review cycle.
The Offer Nobody Took Her Up On
Nobody took the offer. Instead, the episode paints a picture of a star who responded to insecurity the way she responds to everything: by outworking it. “So, I was like, if I suck in this, then it’s over for me,” Kardashian said of her mindset during the shoot. That single line explains the extra preparation she describes putting in, determined that if the film failed, it would not fail because she had coasted on celebrity.
It helps that the material played to strengths her inner circle had long insisted were real. Her talent agent had pitched her to Pell with a simple line: “You have to do a comedy, you’re low-key funny and people don’t know that about you.” Pell, a veteran screenwriter and producer with deep comedy roots, took the meeting — and the film that followed became a genuine test of whether Kardashian’s deadpan delivery could carry a feature alongside seasoned comic actors.
(Eva Rinaldi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0))A Public Relations Playbook of Her Own
Part of what makes the episode compelling is that Kardashian’s vulnerability contradicts her reputation as a master of public relations. When All’s Fair premiered to hostile reviews, her first instinct was pure Kardashian: she reshared the cruelest posts to Instagram, including one that savaged her acting, styling and storylines before confessing to being obsessed, and captioned it by asking whether fans had tuned in to “the most critically acclaimed show of the year.” The sarcasm played well online, but the confessional footage shows the jokes were armour, not indifference.
On a podcast appearance earlier this year, and in countless talk show interviews before it, she has described a simple rule for backlash: address it head on and quickly, the way she killed the Kimono name and launched SKIMS instead. “I hear you,” she said. But The Fifth Wheel wobble was different, because this time the audience she feared disappointing was not online — it was standing next to her on set.
(Web Summit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0))There is also a generational shift underneath the story. Reality television fame was once treated as a disqualification for serious acting work; today, streamers compete for personalities who arrive with their own global audiences. Kardashian is the test case for whether that audience can be carried across formats. All’s Fair proved the audience would show up. The Fifth Wheel will test whether the critics — and, more importantly, repeat viewers — show up a second time.
Kardashian herself seems to understand exactly what is being measured. Her fear was never simply embarrassment; it was that one harsh cycle would close a door she had only just opened, not only for herself but for the producers who had vouched for her. That is why her response was not a publicist’s statement but extra hours — the one currency she has never been accused of withholding from any venture she puts her name on.
Why the Gamble Matters
Despite the pressure, Kardashian insists she had a great time making the film, and that detail matters. Comedy was the genre her team believed could change the conversation, and working under Longoria — an actor-turned-director who understands scrutiny herself — gave her a set where effort, not headlines, set the tone. If The Fifth Wheel lands, the narrative writes itself: the reality star the critics dismissed learned the craft in public and won on the scoreboard that matters.
Either way, the confession has already changed the temperature around the release, replacing easy mockery with something closer to curiosity about whether the work will match the effort she describes putting in.
And if it does not land, the Oct. 22 episode will stand as a rare document of a superstar admitting fear before the result was known. Either way, Kardashian has already achieved something the reviews could not give her: she made the story about the work. For an actress who was ready to walk away so she would not hurt her own movie, that is a comeback worth watching.