Samantha Morton took aim at Harvey Weinstein in a new appearance on “The Louis Theroux Podcast,” claiming that the convicted rapist and former media mogul tried to derail her career after she turned down a role in “About Adam.” Morton explained that she wasn’t interested in the Kate Hudson-led rom-com due to its treatment of women, but Weinstein tried to pressure her into taking the job.
“I said, ‘I don’t like it,’” Morton said, recalling her initial discussions about the script. “‘I think the film is really misogynistic and I don’t want to be part of it.’ The casting director came back with, ‘You don’t say no to Harvey.’ Well it’s not to him. I just don’t want to do this film… and I had just worked with Stuart Townsend on ‘Under the Skin.’ It was just not interesting to me. I was uber-polite.”
She went on to say that Weinstein threatened to blackball her from future acting opportunities unless she took the role, but she stuck to her principles and refused to work on the film.
“I had a phone call saying, ‘You can’t say no,’” she said. “The ‘no’ wasn’t being listened to. So they kept coming back with this role and I was told unequivocally, ‘You’re not going to work again unless you do this role. I’m going to make your life hell. You will not work again.’”
Morton said that Weinstein’s alleged vendetta against her continued to haunt her career for years to come, although she is proud that she found ways to continue to work in independent films without his involvement.
“I forgot about it because it was years earlier,” she said. “And then all these years later, I realized that [when] I get an offer, get a letter from a director, if Miramax or then the Weinstein Company had anything to do with it, it was just awful for me… He had a reason, a deep-seated reason, to just try and destroy my career… He categorically couldn’t, because I kept working, doing independent cinema all over the world.”
