“The fact of the matter is that my two horrendous experiences with directors were male directors.”
Kate Mara says she did not have a good time on set of Josh Trank’s 2015 “Fantastic Four” reboot.
In a new interview with Emmy Magazine, Mara looked back at playing Sue Storm alongside Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell.
“I had a horrible experience on ‘Fantastic Four,'” she told the publication. “I’ve never talked about it before. I married one of my costars [Bell], so I don’t regret doing that movie at all. But do I wish I had responded differently to certain things? Yes, definitely.”
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She declined to go into specific detail, but said that her “two horrendous experiences with directors were male directors.”
“Have I not gotten along with a female director? Absolutely. And was it not the greatest work experience? Sure. But there was never a time that I felt, ‘This is happening because I’m a woman,'” she continued. “Where with the male directors, it 100 percent was only happening with me; it was a power dynamic thing.”
She added, “And on both of my bad experiences, the movies were 95 percent men and I was the only woman in the movie.”
As the #MeToo movement has made Hollywood and the media covering it reanalyze what’s considered acceptable behavior, it’s not just actions on set she won’t accept — but also during interviews and photo shoots.
“Oh God! I look back at some interviews and photo shoots that aren’t from that long ago, and I remember feeling stupid or uncomfortable but thinking, ‘Well, this is what you’re supposed to do,'” she said. “Today I would never agree to any of those things. It’s horrendous and just stupid.”
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When “Fantastic Four” was released, Entertainment Weekly sources alleged the director was “abusive and insulting to the crew and cast,” nearly came to blows with Teller and was “cold to cruel” to Mara, who he reportedly objected to hiring in the first place. He later claimed he wanted to hire a Black actress to play Sue Storm, but was blocked by the studio.
Trank has spoken about some of the turmoil on the set, telling the New York Times earlier this year he was “overly communicative of my needs and my thoughts and my vision. It’s just what I was communicating ultimately didn’t line up with what the studio wanted it to be.”
“I think what was going on with those stories was a concerted effort to engineer an image of me to discredit anything that I could have said [against the studio] when the movie came out,” he added. “When it came down to things like I wasn’t communicating or I was running away into a tent or me and [the film’s star] Miles Teller almost came to blows — which is ridiculous — it’s very easy to take details and exaggerate them into something that they aren’t.”
Mara can now be seen on Hulu’s “A Teacher.”