A director has issued a warning that a prominent Hollywood actor is now receiving legal protection from “troubling” charges.
The director of Apple TV’s Hijack and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Truth Seekers, Jim Field Smith, turned to Twitter to give specifics of claims he had heard about an anonymous actor. He claimed that other people in the industry had ‘dissuaded’ him from hiring them.
He claimed that following allegations that comedian Russell Brand had sexually assaulted a number of women, which were the subject of a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and British newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times, he felt inspired to share what he had learned.
The Russell Brand case brought everything back to his mind, he stated.
“What hope do victims have if someone in a position of relative power, like me, can’t really make a dent on a situation like that?”
Field Smith, 44, claimed that despite there being no formal charges against the actor, they had demonstrated a worrying ‘pattern of behaviour’.
The director revealed in a lengthy Twitter thread that he once decided against employing Actor X because other actors he was meeting for other roles had heard that X might be associated with the project and had made it clear that they would not collaborate on it under those conditions.
“X was not the subject of any criminal accusations, but rather of a pattern of behaviour that multiple individuals had either observed or experienced firsthand. These individuals responded that speaking up didn’t seem to make a difference when I questioned them as to why this wasn’t widely known.
“This was really troubling. After not much deliberation, the casting director and I decided not only to cease negotiations with X, but also more importantly to be very open and honest about why we were doing so.”
Field Smith said he received ‘fury and thinly-veiled threats’ from the actor’s ‘very powerful agency’, before being contacted directly by the star – who ‘calmly and […] somewhat convincingly’ tried to reassure him that anything he’d heard about them ‘was just gossip’.
“But nonetheless they were keen to know who my ‘sources’ were,” he continued.
“When I refused to disclose them, X started listing several possible suspects – none of whom, tellingly, were the original sources, thus convincing me we had made the right decision.
“But of course several years later X is still working, in front of and behind camera. Those that had expressed their concerns originally were all right about one thing for sure – speaking up didn’t seem to make a difference.”
Field Smith continued, drawing parallels between the incident and the Brand case: “Are we really shocked that individuals don’t speak up, when at best it has little influence and at worst it might further devastate their own lives?
“Victims are not required to file charges. Additionally, there is no statute of limitations on s***ty behaviour, contrary to what Russell Brand appears to believe.
“Of course, we should empower and hear the victims’ voices. They should not, however, be made to speak up. It’s us.”
