Warning: this article discusses sexual assault.
Ahead of the season two premier of Westworld, actress Thandie Newton has given an interview in which she criticises the Time’s Up movement for excluding her.
In an interview with News Corp, Newton says she was hurt by the movement’s failure to reach out to her ahead of its January launch, given her pre-#MeToo history of speaking about her experiences of assault in Hollywood.
“At the point when Time’s Up was put together, to not be invited to be a part of it, was very, very painful,” she said.
In 2013, Newton spoke to CNN about ‘casting couch’ experiences as a teenage actress, where a male director asked her to sit with her legs apart and recorded the scene with the camera positioned to see up her skirt. Three years later at Cannes Film Festival, she learnt that the unnamed director had screened the footage at parties.
Additionally, Newton is a board member of V-Day, an fundraising organisation seeking to end violence against women. In her interview, Newton suggests her exclusion from Time’s Up was due to her lack of clout.
“I wasn’t hot enough,” she told News Corp. “I wasn’t mainstream enough and I wasn’t going to be at the Oscars this year, even though I am having a kind of renaissance in my career.”
It’s unclear if Newton conflated the Oscars with January’s Golden Globes, where Time’s Up asked attendees to wear all black and many actresses walked down the red carpet with #MeToo activists. While many attendees addressed Time’s Up at the Oscars in February, there was less of an organised movement at the event in an attempt to move beyond ‘red carpet activism’, according to Ava DuVernay. Either way, Newton wasn’t present.
Newton compared the exclusion to that which she felt when first assaulted.
This is not the first time the Time’s Up movement has been criticised. After the Golden Globes, Rose McGowan called it the movement “fake” on The View. In particular, McGowan cited the “hypocritical” involvement of figures such as Justin Timberlake, who wore black and a Time’s Up pin on the red carpet but has remained silent on working with Woody Allen on 2017 film Wonder Wheel.
If you would like to seek support / counselling around issues of sexual assault or harassment, you can contact 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800 for 24/7, completely confidential support.
Source: Daily Telegraph
Image credit: Reynaud Julien/APS-Medias/ABACA
