A version of this story about “She Said” first appeared in the Guilds & Critics Awards/Documentaries issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
They showed up at the New York Times building like journalists reporting for work, except that the Times was shut down because of COVID and the workers who showed up were actors: Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan playing reporters, Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as their editors, and many others who’d borrowed the Times’ offices for a couple of weeks of shooting on “She Said.”
The film from director Maria Schrader, recently released by Universal to strong reviews but tepid box-office returns, is based on the book by Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Mulligan) about how they broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse. One of its strengths is the richness of the ensemble that filled what otherwise would have been a nearly-empty Times building — along with the wrenching work of other actors like Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, who show up midway through the film as survivors of Weinstein’s misconduct.
“The ensemble of characters is fascinating in this movie and so beautifully observed and nuanced,” Clarkson said. “Every person that walks on the screen is so three-dimensional and rich.”
At the center of that ensemble are Kazan and Mulligan, who in real life have been close friends for more than a decade. “We met 14 years ago, when we did (a Broadway production of) “The Seagull” together in our early 20s,” Mulligan said. “We shared a tiny dressing room on the top floor and became incredibly good friends very quickly. And ever since then we’ve been trying to find something to act in together — a play or a film or a TV show, whatever it may be.”
When Mulligan showed the “She Said” script to her husband, musician Marcus Mumford, his response was immediate: “It’s amazing, and Zoe Kazan should play Jodi Kantor.” Mulligan didn’t have any say in the casting, but when she heard Kazan was meeting with the producers, she called her friend immediately. “I remember speaking to Zoe, and I was practically crying with excitement,” she said. “I didn’t want her to feel pressure, but I also couldn’t imagine doing it with anyone else.”
Kazan said she found the script “so smart and economical, and it portrayed a kind of working motherhood that I have so rarely seen on film. And I found it tremendously moving — I cried when I read the script for the first time, and every time after.”
Working together, Mulligan added, the actresses had an easy shorthand. “We didn’t have to do any of the getting-to-know-you stuff,” she said. “It was just straight into sharing notes and ideas.”
The two actresses had one week of going through the script with Schrader (“Unorthodox”, “I’m Your Man”), then a second week with more of the ensemble. “We hit the ground running in the New York Times building,” Mulligan said. “When you are working with extraordinary actors like Patricia and Andre and Frank (Wood), they bring all that richness on day one. Andre was Dean (Baquet) and made that newsroom feel like it was his newsroom. Patricia similarly has that presence, and Frank feels like someone who’s worked at the New York Times for 30 years. That made it very easy for us to build that newsroom relationship quickly.”
“I thought being in the building was extraordinary,” Braugher said. “That building could have potentially been recreated on a set somewhere, but it wouldn’t carry that kind of psychic truth. It was where the things actually happened, as opposed to where we’re pretending that they’re happening, you know?”
The supporting cast was in and out briefly, with Morton having a single scene and Ehle popping up a handful of times. “I was only on set for two days,” said Ehle, who played Laura Madden, the first survivor to agree to go on the record for the Times. “We didn’t rehearse beforehand, but I felt a huge responsibility to Laura. I had to practice putting that aside so that I could do my job and not feel shackled by my wanting to honor her so badly.”
To some degree, the entire ensemble felt that way—none more so than Clarkson, who made two movies with Weinstein. “There were so many things at play for me when I took this film, having been produced by Harvey and having suffered his bullying,” she said. “I was never sexually abused by Harvey, thankfully, but I have suffered his wrath in a way that was demoralizing and impactful in my life. We’ve all risen out of the cesspool of Harvey, and we are all here to talk about it and tell the real story that was kept from so many of us in Hollywood by his enablers.”
For Kazan and Mulligan, neither of whom ever worked for Weinstein, the usual pressures of playing real people mixed with the sense that “She Said” was being made not for the reporters, but for the victims and the survivors. “I think that that responsibility far outweighed the responsibility that we felt to portray Jodi and Megan accurately,” Kazan said. “I think we all felt that on set, from the top down. I mean, even from Donna Langley, who’s the head of Universal. Talking to Donna before we started filming, I felt like, ‘Oh, we all have the exact same goal in mind, and we feel the same weight of responsibility.’”
“Everyone I went to school with, all my friends at home — we all grew up in a predatory time for women,” Mulligan added. “But it’s also an issue that affected our mothers and grandmothers. Everyone has something in their lives that is touched by this, whether it’s abuse and assault or just a feeling of being diminished by an environment where women are made to feel lesser than.
“We have grown up armed against a threat and aware that as a girl and a woman, there’s a risk that’s felt within every industry, and certainly within ours. That’s what makes this film so universal — as Jodi says in the film, if this is happening to Hollywood actresses, who else could it be happening to?”
But the Hollywood part of the equation is central to “She Said,” which is being released by an industry that until the New York Times story and the rise of the MeToo movement continued to give power to Harvey Weinstein and his ilk.
“The thing I keep coming back to in my head,” Kazan said, “is that when a system is built to support a monster, everyone is implicated. You can’t exist in the system without feeling some implication. And I think it’s the reason that we need institutions like the New York Times to put their muscle behind people who are capable of exposing the truth.”
And does she see any real change now? “Progress is incremental, and it doesn’t go in a straight line,” she said. “When this article came out in 2017, my knee-jerk reaction was, ‘Is this going to change anything?’ I felt like the answer was going to be no, and I was wrong. And one of the biggest changes is that if the same article came out today, I wouldn’t have that question in my mind.
“The solution is not going to come overnight, but I think we have begun to hold people in power to account.”
Read more from the Guilds & Critics/Documentary issue here.
