Woody Allen Says Actors Who Refused to Work With Him ‘Made A Mistake’
While Woody Allen’s movie career was unaffected for two decades after sexual abuse allegations and his relationship with partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, that all changed during the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, A-list actors no longer wanted to appear in his films. Other stars who’d appeared in Allen movies distanced themselves from the director.
Not Bill Maher! He counted himself among Allen’s defenders on this week’s Club Random podcast, alongside stars such as Scarlett Johansson and Alec Baldwin. Maher called out others, including Kate Winslet, Mira Sorvino (who won an Oscar for Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite) and Greta Gerwig, who publicly expressed their regret about appearing in Allen’s movies.
“If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film,” Gerwig told The New York Times in 2018. “I have not worked for him again, and I will not work for him again.”
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Allen isn’t mad, however. “These are people that just made a mistake,” Allen told an irate Maher. “I’m not criticizing them. They thought they were doing the right thing, but they were not.”
Maher disagreed about the actors’ good intentions. “They were cowards. Are you kidding?” he said. For example, Maher pointed to Timothée Chalamet’s awards campaign for playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. “This boy wants an Oscar more than his next breath. He’d throw his mother under the bus!”
Chalamet spoke out against Allen on Instagram well before that Oscar campaign. “I have been asked in a few recent interviews about my decision to work on a film with Woody Allen last summer,” he posted after filming A Rainy Day in New York. “I’m not able to answer the question directly because of contractual obligations. But what I can say is this: I don’t want to profit from my work on the film, and to that end, I am going to donate my entire salary to three charities: TIME’S UP, The LGBT Center in New York and RAINN. I want to be worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the brave artists who are fighting for all people to be treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.”
Allen wouldn’t bash Chalamet or Gerwig, though he continued to insist they were misguided. “I’ve had a good time working with both of them,” he said. “And they think that they’re doing something honorable or helpful, but they’re not. They guessed wrong. They made a wrong decision on that. Someday, maybe they’ll realize it. Maybe it will be clear to them for whatever reason. Maybe it never will be. But that’s all that they’ve done, is made a mistake.”
Bah, replied Maher. “They’re such sheep.”
