Actress Thandie Newton has opened up about a troubling incident with an unnamed director who she said filmed her touching her breasts during an audition, then proceeded to showcase the footage for friends.
“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 in an interview with W Magazine. “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 strange request turned out to be much worse than she thought when a producer drunkenly 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.
The incident no doubt proved traumatic, but Newton said it taught her a valuable lesson about working in the business.
“I was so so naïve when I started out and I realize now that we have to prepare our kids,” she said. “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 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.”
Newton will appear in the upcoming HBO series “Westworld.” She is known for her roles in films like the Oscar-winning “Crash,” “For Colored Girls,” and “The Pursuit of Happyness.”