Olivia Munn Reveals Male Director Tried to ‘Ruin’ Her Career
Olivia Munn revealed on an episode of Dax Shepherd’s “Armchair Expert” podcast (via The Daily Beast) that a director she worked with on HBO’s “The Newsroom” tried to “ruin” her career by preventing her from landing a movie role. The director, who remained unnamed, told the studio that Munn was “really combative” on set after the two shared disagreements on the set of the Aaron Sorkin-created television series.
“There was a storyline where my character and Tom Sadoski’s character are dating and falling in love,” Munn explained. “[The director] kept trying to force me to carry that storyline only on my side. He’s like, ‘Can you look out at him and smile?’ And I’m like, ‘Why she’s busy doing this?’ Or, ‘Can you stop and snuggle up to him or flirt with him?’ Or, ‘Can you give him a kiss?’ And I’m like, ‘This is in the middle of working.’”
Munn later heard from someone on her team that this director was telling people at a film studio that she was difficult to work with.
“I was on the one-yard-line for the movie and my manager calls me and says, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get the role. But first, I guess there’s another director who they know and he says that on “The Newsroom” you were late all the time and really combative,’” Munn said. “I lived seven minutes from there. I was never late. I was like, ‘I know who this is.’ He just was trying to bash me. And I told my reps, ‘Please tell the directors this.’ And then I still got the role. But I will always remember that just because of our conflicts of how we approached a role, he wanted to ruin my chances of getting anything else.”
Munn has been outspoken throughout her career regarding the many injustices she has faced on film and television sets. She accused director Brett Ratner of sexual harassment in 2017, alleging to The Los Angeles Times that he masturbated in front of her in his trailer when she visited the set of his movie “After the Sunset” in 2004. A year after coming forward, Munn went public again to reveal that she reported to 20th Century Fox during the making of 2018’s “Predators” that director Shane Black hired his friend and registered sex offender Steven Wilder Striegel to appear in a small role opposite her. Black ultimately apologized.
In an interview on the “Reclaiming” podcast earlier this year, Munn revealed she once turned down an offer worth millions of dollars from a studio to sign an NDA after she endured a “traumatic” incident on a movie set.
Watch Munn’s full interview on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in the video below.
