Shed crocodile tears Informal

To display insincere or hypocritical grief, sadness, or sympathy, without actually feeling it.

It’s used to accuse someone of performing emotion for appearances, often right after they’ve caused the very harm they’re now pretending to mourn.

The phrase draws on an ancient belief, already circulating in antiquity, that crocodiles wept while devouring their prey, as if mourning the very victim they were killing; a proverb collection attributed to Plutarch already compares this behavior to people who cause someone’s downfall and then publicly grieve for them. The story was repeated and moralized in medieval Christian writing and bestiaries, and reached wide English audiences through the fourteenth-century travel narrative attributed to Sir John Mandeville, which describes crocodiles eating men “weeping” while moving only their upper jaw. Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser both referenced the belief in their work, cementing “crocodile tears” firmly in English long after naturalists had thoroughly disproven the idea that crocodiles feel anything like grief while feeding.

He shed crocodile tears at the funeral after years of ignoring his grandmother.

Don’t fall for her crocodile tears, she’s just trying to avoid getting in trouble.

The CEO shed crocodile tears about the layoffs he himself ordered.

A: He seemed so upset about the news. B: Please, those were crocodile tears.