Olivia Munn Says She Feels Like The ‘Bad Guy’ After Having A Scene With A Sex Offender Cut From Her New Film

The Predator, the newest iteration of the classic science fiction series, premiered at Toronto Film Festival last week in the midst of a still-brewing controversy.

On Thursday, lead actress Olivia Munn told the LA Times that she had to ask the studio to cut a scene she was in with actor Steve Wilder after she discovered was a convicted sex offender. Wilder turned out to be a friend of the director Shane Black, who has repeatedly cast him in his films since he got out of jail for grooming a 14-year-old girl in 2010.

“[Black] made a ‘personal choice’ to continually work with a convicted sex offender, but I didn’t have a choice,” Munn later tweeted. “That decision was made for me. And that’s not okay.”

Black apologised in a statement to the LA Times, saying he had been ‘mislead’ by his friend on the severity of his crimes:

I personally chose to help a friend… I believe strongly in giving people second chances — but sometimes you discover that chance is not as warranted as you may have hoped. I apologise to all of those, past and present, I’ve let down by having Steve around them without giving them a voice in the decision.

Munn said that she is contractually obligated to continue to promote the film, but reckoned by their reaction that her co-stars would rather she didn’t. Speaking to Vanity Fair on Saturday, she said she hadn’t been contacted personally by the director or her fellow actors, and that she was dismayed to see them give Black a standing ovation at the film’s premiere.

https://twitter.com/oliviamunn/status/1038552036952825858

She claimed that her co-stars (bar 11-year-old Jacob Tremblay) had cancelled press appearances with her leaving her to do interviews alone, and one had walked out when the issue of the cut scene had come up:

I kind of feel like I’m the one going to jail. I didn’t put this guy on our set. I had this scene deleted. Thank God, honestly, that there is social media. It’s the fans and news outlets that’s confirming it to me that what I did was the right thing. If I didn’t have this feedback, I’d kind of go a little crazy thinking, ‘Why am I being treated like this?’ That’s not okay, to feel like the bad guy.

Munn has even said that she’s considering leaving the industry altogether: “I love being an actor, but if it comes at this cost, who wants it? Who cares? I’m so much more than who I am as an actor… I love it, but they can take it, if that’s what it comes down to.”

Her co-stars have since decided to stand by her (kind of) – yesterday, Sterling K Brown tweeted that she “did the right thing” and that everyone has the right to know who they’re working with:

Thank you to @20thcenturyfox for taking quick action in deleting the scene. @oliviamunn I hope you don’t feel quite so alone. You did the right thing. 🕉

— Sterling K Brown (@SterlingKBrown) September 9, 2018

Actors Trevante Rhodes and Augusto Aguilera later sat for an interview with Munn, saying they were “disappointed in the situation” rather than Black. Hmm.

“The truth is that the situation that we’re in over the last year or so, the #MeToo movement, it really exists because the people online who are appalled and outraged and demanding that things be changed,” said Munn.

The people who are at the top, the people colluding to keep abusers in power, the people who are colluding to turn a blind eye so that they can keep making money, they are the people who created this disparity in the first place. We can’t really depend on them to make a change.

“It was a very lonely time for me that day. I don’t care if this movie was going to give me $100m, it’s not worth being quiet over that. My silence is not for sale.”

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