Actress Léa Seydoux, known for her role in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” is now among a growing list of women who have detailed sexual harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein.
“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.”
Seydoux went on to write about how she had seen Weinstein attempt to make advances at other women several instances when she saw him at events following the incident.
“I’ve seen how he operates: the way he looks for an opening,” Seydoux wrote. “The way he tests women to see what he can get away with….He also doesn’t take no for an answer. I once went with him to a restaurant and when he couldn’t get a table he got angry and said: ‘Do you know who I am? I am Harvey Weinstein.’ That’s the kind of man he is.”
But Seydoux didn’t restrict her criticism to Weinstein. She also described other instances of sexual harassment she suffered from other men in the entertainment industry. Though she did not mention him by name, she alluded to the extended sex scenes she had to film on the set of “Blue Is the Warmest Color” at the demands of director Abdellatif Kechiche. In an interview with The Independent in 2013, Seydoux said she felt “like a prostitute” while filming the sex scenes, which lasted for days.
“He kept watching us, replaying the scenes over and over again in a kind of stupor. It was very gross,” she wrote. “Yet another director tried to kiss me. Like Weinstein, I had to physically push him away, too. He acted like a crazy man, deranged by the fact that I didn’t want to have sex with him.”
“If you’re a woman working in the film industry, you have to fight because it is a very misogynistic world.”