Lena Headey says rejecting Harvey Weinstein may have affected an entire decade of her career
In the wake of the many serious and disturbing allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Game of Thrones actress Lena Headey came forward with two separate accounts of sexual misconduct involving the movie mogul. In a series of 2017 tweets, Headey first recounted an encounter she had with Weinstein while promoting The Brothers Grimm. The producer made a sexually suggestive comment to her while they were alone on a walk and implied that they should kiss.
"I remember thinking, 'It's got to be a joke,'" she wrote. "I just laughed it off. I was genuinely shocked. 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."
Headey later described an even scarier encounter several years after the first event. She had a meeting with Weinstein for another project but felt confident that he would respect her boundaries after she had been so clear with him previously. After their breakfast meeting in a hotel, he asked her to accompany him to his room under the pretense of picking up a script.
"We walked to the lift and the energy shifted. 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. [...] He was silent after I spoke, furious."
She said he then forcefully escorted her back down to her car with an arm tight on her back, making her feel “powerless.”
"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," she concluded.
And now, in a February 17th interview with The Times, Headey opened up about how she thinks the rejection likely affected her career.
"After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘F-ck, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life.' Because I did two jobs for Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing.”
Thank you so much for sharing your story, Lena. We know it will empower even more women to share their truths.
