Lena Headey, the actress best known for playing Cersei Lannister, thinks that refusing sex with disgraced ex-film producer Harvey Weinstein may have hurt her career for a decade. Headey made those comments in a recent interview with the UK Sunday Times' Culture Section.
Back in October 2017, Headey had accused Weinstein of sexual harassment from her Twitter account, where she wrote about two encounters, including one that she said left her in tears.
Now, she's once again opening up about her Weinstein run-ins, which she thinks negatively impacted her work as an actress. "After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘F—, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life," she said. "Because I did two jobs for [Weinstein’s production company] Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing.”
Prior to that, she also detailed similar allegations that say she was blackballed after meeting Weinstein for the first time during a 2005 screening of The Brothers Grimm at the Venice Film Festival. "At one point Harvey asked me to take a walk down to the water, I walked down with him and he stopped and made some suggestive comment, a gesture," she said at the time. "I just laughed it off, I was genuinely shocked. I remember thinking, 'It’s got to be a joke.' I said something like… ‘Oh come on mate?! It’d be like kissing my dad! Let’s go get a drink, get back to the others.’ I was never in any other Miramax film."
She said that the next time she bumped into Weinstein, which happened years later, he made another attempt.
“I had always carried the thought that he’d never try anything with me again, not after I'd laughed and said never in a million years,’’ she said. “I believed he respected my boundary, and maybe he wanted to talk about potential work."
"He asked to meet me for breakfast. We ate breakfast, we talked about films, filmmaking. He asked me a few questions about the state of my love life. I shifted the conversation back to something less personal."
She says that he then went to the bathroom, and when he came back, he suggested the two go up to his hotel room to give her a script.
“We walked to the lift and the energy shifted,” she relayed. “My whole body went into high alert, the lift was going up and I said to Harvey, ‘I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen,’ I said. I don’t know what possessed me to speak out at that moment, only that I had such a strong sense of 'don’t come near me.'
"He was silent after I spoke, furious. We got out of the lift and walked to his room. His hand was on my back, he was marching me forward, not a word, I felt completely powerless, he tried his key card and it didn’t work, then he got really angry. He walked me back to the lift, through the hotel to the valet, by grabbing and holding tightly to the back of my arm. He paid for my car and whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t tell anyone about this, not your manager, not your agent.’ I got into my car and cried.”
Weinstein's reps have denied those allegations.
In related news, Weinstein's sexual assault trial has been pushed back from May 6 to June 3. The trial, which will take place at Manhattan Supreme Court, got rescheduled because Weinstein's attorneys had requested additional time. The specific reason wasn't filed in papers that were made public, but two members of Weinstein's legal team (Jose Baez and Ronald Sullivan) are slated for a 10-week trial in Brooklyn federal court that begins on Tuesday. The original May trial date for Weinstein had been established prior to Weinstein hiring the two men on.
His charges include two counts of criminal sexual act in the first degree, and two counts of predatory sexual assault, and first and third degree rape. If convicted he could do life in prison.
