It’s been well over six years since Joseph Fiennes appeared as Michael Jackson in a controversial never-to-be-air episode of the British fantasy series Urban Myths, and he still has regrets.
In an interview with UK’s The Guardian yesterday, Fiennes said the 2016 Urban Myths episode was “a wrong decision.”
“Absolutely,” Fiennes said. “And I’m one part of that — there are producers, broadcasters, writers, directors, all involved in these decisions. But you know, it came at a time where there was a movement and a shift and that was good, and it was, you know, a bad call. A bad mistake.”
The actor added that people were “absolutely right to be upset.”
In the never-aired episode, Fiennes played Michael Jackson to Brian Cox’s Marlon Brando and Stockard Channing’s Elizabeth Taylor. The surreal storyline had the trio of friends on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
At the time, Jackson’s daughter Paris expressed her displeasure. “I’m so incredibly offended by it,” she tweeted, “as I’m sure plenty of people are as well, and it honestly makes me want to vomit.”
Also in the Guardian interview, Fiennes, who starred in the 1998 Miramax hit Shakespeare in Love, says he was bullied by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, and that the situation was so bad that the actor turned down the producer’s offer of a five-picture deal.
Fiennes, who currently is starring in the play Dear England at the National Theatre in London, recalls that he was summoned to meet with Weinstein, who offered the deal by warning that turning it down would be “very bad” for his career.
“It was a bullying tactic that didn’t sit well,” Fiennes says in the interview. “The way he explained it was a shock to me. But I suddenly sat in the room very present, and happy and strong in myself to say, you know what, I’m not beholden to that. I’m stepping away.”
Fiennes says he has no regrets over that decision. “I was out of the [Miramax] family. But I was very happy not to be in the family.”
