David Cross is gearing up to deliver a mea culpa to his “Arrested Development” co-star Jessica Walter, following the fallout from a New York Times interview earlier this week, in which her male co-stars seemed to defend Jeffrey Tambor when Walter said that Tambor had verbally harassed her.
In an interview with Gothamist published Thursday, Cross — who plays Tobias Funke on the series — said that he will “unequivocally apologize.”
Cross also said that his wife, Amber Tamblyn, and “Arrested Development” co-star Alia Shawkat had expressed “their discomfort” over the interview.
“I’ll say this: two people that I deeply respect, and I listen to and I love and appreciate, expressed to me after that interview their discomfort with it. One of those was Alia and the other was my wife,” Cross said. “I listened to them, and I can’t and wouldn’t ever dismiss their take on something. And they are also two people who are aware of the bigger picture. So, it means even more than it normally would, which is a lot.”
Cross added, “So I will unequivocally apologize to Jessica. I’m sorry that we behaved the way we behaved. Whatever the criticisms are, I will own up.”
The actor continued, “There’s never an excuse ever for yelling at somebody and humiliating them in front of other people.”
In the interview, Walter said her on-screen husband Tambor “never crossed the line on our show, with any, you know, sexual whatever. Verbally, yes, he harassed me, but he did apologize. I have to let it go.”
“I have to let go of being angry at him,” Walter said of Tambor. She added that in “almost 60 years of working, I’ve never had anybody yell at me like that on a set and it’s hard to deal with, but I’m over it now.”
The report, published Wednesday, said Walter, who plays Lucille Bluth, spoke through tears as Tambor sat a few feet away.
In the interview, “Arrested Development” star Jason Bateman said that the behavior Walter described was typical with certain performers, while his co-star Tony Hale said, “we’ve all had moments … we’ve worked together 15 years, there has been other points of anger coming out.”
Both Bateman and Hale subsequently took to Twitter to apologize. However, the interview sparked fierce backlash on social media.
“Jessica Walter actually cries in this interview about how terrible Jeffrey Tambor was to her and her male co-stars go to extraordinary lengths to comfort and defend …Tambor. FFS,” New York Magazine writer Marin Cogan wrote on Twitter.
“By age 35 you should know better than to try and convince your weeping female coworker that the workplace verbal abuse she experienced is no big deal,” screenwriter and director Eric Haywood said.