Actress Thandie Newton, who will soon appear in HBO’s upcoming series “Westworld,” told a troubling story to W Magazine recently about her sexual abuse at the hands of a director for whom she was auditioning.
“A director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my tits and think about the guy making love to me in the scene. I thought, ‘Ok, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it,” she told W, but neglected to name the director involved.
Years later the footage came back to haunt her, when, at a film festival, a producer drunkenly approached her saying, “‘Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!’ And he lurched away looking really shocked that he’d said that. It turns out that the director was showing that audition tape to his friends after poker games at his house. And they would all get off on it,” Newton said.
Newton uses the incident as a lesson to her daughters and other young actresses who may feel the need to appear amicable or easy going in auditions. “I was so so naïve when I started out and I realize now that we have to prepare our kids — I’ve got two beautiful daughters, one is 16 one is 11. So many people in our business, they don’t want to be the ones to say something that’s a bum out because then they become associated with a bum out and nobody wants to read about so-and-so because they’re always blabbering on about a bum out,” she said. “But one person will read this and it will stop them getting sexually abused by a director. That’s the person I’m interested in.”
It’s incredibly maddening that this happens to so many women in the industry. While we wish the perpetrators were named more often, we understand why they aren’t: no actress wants to be accused of lying or thrown into movie jail. Just talking about these incidents — without naming names — can lead to trouble for actresses. But speaking out helps expose the widespread prevalence of sexism and abuse within the industry, so we admire Newton and other actresses for sharing their stories despite possible blow-back.
