Sex & The City actress Sarah Jessica Parker has revealed that she once reported a “big movie star” for “behaving inappropriately” on set.
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While the star does not stipulate which project the incident occurred on, she does say that it was ongoing behaviour which included jokes about her body and suggestive comments.
Speaking on NPR’s Fresh Air radio programme, Parker recalled how in the months after MeToo became a global conversation, she began “recognising countless experiences of men behaving poorly, inappropriately” throughout her career.
Parker explained how she would “push it away” at the time and brush the behaviour off so she could continue working.
“To be honest, I don’t know why I either wasn’t courageous or more destroyed by some of the things that I was privy to, that I was on the receiving end of,” she said.
Parker says there was only one occasion when she took action against someone “who was behaving, not only inappropriately, but perhaps even I would say, they weren’t living up to contractual obligations as well”.
She recalls: “There was a situation with somebody and I did go to my agent — because I felt I was no longer able to convey how uncomfortable this was making me, how inappropriate it was.”
After informing her agent of the inappropriate behaviour, “within hours everything had changed.”
“[Her agent] said to them, ‘If this continues, I have sent her a ticket, a one-way ticket out of this city’ — where I was shooting — ‘and she will not be returning.’”
When asked how on-set culture changed after she reported the incident, Parker explained that it wasn’t “perfectly pleasant”.
“But I didn’t have to be coy any longer and I didn’t have to dread a potential conversation,” she added.
“I didn’t have to listen to jokes about me or my figure or what people thought they could talk me into doing. All these men. All these men. That stopped. The nature of the person who I felt was really the instigator, this was a grown man, a very big movie star and you know he was baked, meaning his personality, it was cooked. He was a formed person and that wasn’t going to change.”
“But I felt certainly better and safer, like I could finish what I had agreed to do.”
