During a recent appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, Olivia Munn said one of her former male co-stars refused to help her in one scene and halted production for “45 minutes” to fight story beats.
“When I was filming something, there were a few scenes where my character was like the CIA or a cop or something, and my character saves other characters,” Mann said. The scene in question showed Mann and her male co-star fighting side by side inside a bunker.
“When I read the script, he was keeping his side and I was keeping mine. Then we switched positions and then there was a guy coming after him and he was going to shoot him in the back, so I shot him,” she recalled. “And then we’re about to start shooting, and for some reason he probably didn’t read the script. At that moment, he realizes, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, she can’t save me. No, no, she can’t save me.’
Mann said her co-stars then stopped filming and “became grumpy with the director” over the moment. She added: “I never had any fear that I would be offensive or that anyone who heard this would think, ‘She can’t save me! We didn’t do that.'”
“Finally, after we stopped for about 45 minutes, I said, ‘Okay, instead of my character saving you, how about we switch. It’s time to switch, so I’m the one who’s going to get this person,'” she said. “And he was like, ‘Okay.’
This isn’t the first time Mann has shared a bad experience with a male colleague on set. On an episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast Armchair Expert, she said a director she worked with on HBO’s The Newsroom tried to “ruin her chances” of getting a role in the movie by telling the studio she was “very combative” during filming.
“I was on the one-yard line after the movie, and my manager called and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to get the role. But first, I think they know another director who said that on ‘The Newsroom,’ you were always late and very combative,” Mann said. “I lived seven minutes away from there. I was never late. I was like, ‘I know who this person is.'” He was just trying to hit me. And I said to the person in charge, “Please convey this to the directors.” And I still got the role. But I always remember him trying to ruin my chances of getting any other roles just because we clashed about how we approached the role. ”
