Ruth Wilson says she doesn’t think there should ever be a place for non-disclosure agreements in Hollywood.
The His Dark Materials star discussed her stance on their historical use in the industry in a new profile for The Guardian. Published on Saturday, the interview is tied to Wilson’s stage project, The Second Woman at the Young Vic, and how the 24-hour performance consisting of a single scene repeated 100 times on a loop tests and challenges her as a performer.
At one point, the conversation turns to her departure from The Affair, something she once again declines to discuss “in any way, shape or form,” according to the outlet. “I don’t think there should be any NDAs,” she told the outlet when asked if there was a place for them. “If there’s a problem, there’s a problem. It needs to be dealt with, not put under NDA so you can’t speak about it.”
Wilson goes on to point to their infamous use by the convicted rapist and former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as further proof of their weaponization. “It was a given that you had to sign those things … Even if you were like, ‘What? Really?’ They were like, ‘That’s the way it works.’”
She also calls other members of the industry, including agents, producers and PR people, “complicit” in using them as a way of “protecting the powerful. #MeToo was significant because it was unraveling that.”
Several sources told The Hollywood Reporter in a story published in December 2019 that Wilson’s decision to leave Showtime’s The Affair was driven by what she felt was a “hostile” work environment — and one that was investigated in 2017 by the network’s parent company CBS. The star — who was according to sources restrained by an NDA and thus couldn’t discuss the nature of her departure — had grown frustrated by the nudity required of her on the series.
One source also told THR that the repeated calls for Wilson to bare her body had no other purpose than to be “titillating.” And while the former Affair star had signed a nudity waiver during pilot testing, a SAG-AFTRA spokesperson told THR at the time that performers must still “provide meaningful consent and be treated with respect and dignity during production.”
Series creator Sarah Treem, in particular, was identified as having put pressure on Wilson around performing those scenes, with the actress allegedly being generally labeled “difficult” as a result of her pushback. That included Wilson allegedly declining to film a season two scene described by a source as “rapey,” and that was ultimatley filmed by a body double who filed and settled a seperate lawsuit in 2017 with the network over the conduct of a male assistant director. (Treem told THR the sequence Wilson declined to film was written to be a consensual sex scene but that Wilson didn’t agree with the character’s choice.)
During The Guardian interview, Wilson also got candid about the hypocritical and confusing standards around “female empowerment” of the modern era, why social media is inauthetic and why she thinks expecting unwavering solidarity among women is “unrealistic.” At one point, she calls the efforts to promote the use of botox, cosmetic surgery and other procedures like thread lifts “massive violence.”
“We’re like, ‘Wow’, today. But in 200 years, they’ll be looking back at images of women now going, ‘What were they doing?’ ‘What is that? You’re blowing your face and lips up,’” she added. “Yet it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. And women are part of that industry, perpetuating this ‘empowerment’.”
Wilson also called out that “empowerment” specifically within Hollywood, explaining that for her, women are people like anyone else and therefore “to expect them all to be supporting each other is kind of unrealistic.”
That inauthenticity can emerge through social media, and while discussing how some of her friends have become “obsessed” with their social feeds, Wilson criticizes how the medium has led to performantie activism, including feminism. “Nothing is real. I don’t believe any of it. No one has real or strong beliefs,” she said. “They are just dictated to.”
That is something Wilson points to happening, too, in Hollywood — a place where a certain “game” is being played that she isn’t interested in participating in. She saw it, in a way, around #MeToo, with the actress stating that she’s not quite convinced the impetice to change came from the most genuine of places. Insteads she calls the shifts a “survival instinct,” in a “fickle” industry that has “no moral backbone.”
“People were like, ‘We’re going to have a meeting about how badly we’ve behaved and then we’ll all be fine.’ It blew my mind,” she said. “So many people don’t really believe anything — only what makes them money. They’re opportunists. You see that. But it makes you sage about what you want, what’s important. Do you want to live in that world? Or would you prefer to be doing something else, like this weird 24-hour play, where you can explore things in a safe environment?”
Source: Hollywood
