The 'Westworld' actress hopes her horrible experience become a warning for many upcoming young actors of the dark side of the business.
- Jul 3, 2016
AceShowbiz - Thandie Newton had a horrible experience when she was younger working in Hollywood as an up and coming actress. Without mentioning any names, the "Westworld" star revealed she was sexually abused by a director during an audition.
"A director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my t*** and think about the guy making love to me in the scene," she told W Magazine. "I thought, 'OK, this is a little weird,' but there was a female casting director in the room and I'd done weird stuff before so I did it."
The director would later use her audition to entertain her guests at late-night parties, but the actress didn't know it until years later when a producer told her drunkenly at a film festival, "Oh, Thandie, I've seen you recently!" She said, "It turns out that the director was showing that audition tape to his friends after poker games at his house. And they would all get off on it."
The experience left her emotionally scarred but taught his a valuable lesson. "I was so so naive when I started out and I realize now that we have to prepare our kids - I've got two beautiful daughters, one is 16 one is 11," she explained.
"So many people in our business, they don't want to be the ones to say something that's a bum out because then they become associated with a bum out and nobody wants to read about so-and-so because they're always blabbering on about a bum out. But one person will read this and it will stop them getting sexually abused by a director. That's the person I'm interested in."
It's not the first time Thandie Newton talked about the sexual abuse. Back in 2013, she told CNN the "kinds of things I was expected to do in auditions." She remembered, "The director asked me to sit with my legs apart; the camera was right positioned where it could see up my skirt."
She was asked to "put my leg over the arm of the chair, and before I started my dialogue, think about the character I was supposed to be having the dialogue with and how it felt to be made love to by this person."
