British actress Thandie Newton, who is slated to appear in the new HBO series Westworld, recently revealed a disturbing incident with an unnamed director. The actress said the creep filmed her touching her breasts during an audition, then showed the recording to his friends.
She gave W magazine details of the troubling episode: “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,” Newton said. “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.”
Years later, the actress said the strange request came roaring back as a drunk producer approached her at a film festival and said, “‘Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!’”
“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,” she said.
Although the incident was clearly repulsive and traumatic, Newton said it taught her a valuable lesson about speaking up.
“I’ve got two beautiful daughters; one is 16 one is 11,” she says. “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 continued.
“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.”
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