Hollywood’s Leading Ladies Share Their Worst Casting Couch Stories

Thandie Newton

Thandie Newton revealed she was sexually abused by a casting director when she was just a teenager. 

“The director asked me to sit with my legs apart, and the camera was positioned where it could see up my skirt,” Newton told CNN back in 2013. “[He asked me 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.”

Newton added that the director then circulated the video at parties. 

Charlize Theron

Theron’s casting couch experience happened when she was just 19 years old and new to Hollywood. She told OK! magazine of the experience in a 2009 interview. 

“I thought it was a little odd that the audition was on a Saturday night at his house in Los Angeles, but I thought maybe that was normal,” Theron explained. “He was in his Hugh Hefner pajamas — I go inside and he’s offering me a drink, and I’m thinking, ‘My God this acting stuff is very relaxed.’ But it soon becomes very clear what the situation was. I was like, ‘Not going to happen! Got the wrong girl, buddy!'”

Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth Paltrow may have come from a Hollywood family, but that didn’t stop her from also encountering the dark side of the industry.

“When I was just starting out, someone suggested that we finish a meeting in the bedroom,” Paltrow told Elle. “I left. I was pretty shocked. I could see how someone who didn’t know better might worry, ‘My career will be ruined if I don’t give this guy a blow job!'”

Judy Garland

Gerald Clark, who wrote Judy Garland’s biography Get Happy, uncovered the abuse Garland suffered while at MGM.

“The worst of the lot was Louis B. Mayer, the head of the studio,” Clark recalled while speaking with ABC News. “Mayer would tell her what a wonderful singer she was, and he would say, ‘You sing from the heart,’ and then he would place his hand on her left breast and say, ‘This is where you sing from.’ This went on for about four years until finally Judy got up enough courage to say to him: ‘Mr. Mayer, don’t you ever do that again. If you want to tell me where I sing from, just point.’ Instead of firing her or getting into a fury, Mayer sat down and cried and he said ‘How can you say that to me, to me who has treated you like a father.'”

Megan Fox

Megan Fox has been a vocal opponent of Hollywood sexism. After infamously calling out director Michael Bay, Fox also revealed she has been propositioned many a time by Hollywood heavyweights. 

“Any casting-couch shit I’ve experienced has been since I’ve become famous,” Fox revealed to British GQ. “It’s really so heartbreaking. Some of these people! Like Hollywood legends. You think you’re going to meet them and you’re so excited, like, ‘I can’t believe this person wants to have a conversation with me,’ and you get there and you realize that’s not what they want, at all. It’s happened a lot this year actually.”

Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple revealed the scary side of being a child star in her 1988 memoir Child Star. She wrote of an incident in 1940 in which a producer exposed himself to her when she was just 12 years old.

Cher

In an attempt to empower her female followers, Cher wrote on Twitter in October 2016 that she was once in a scary position with a producer at his house. She said she got out of the house and “we never spoke again.” She added, “no job is worth that.”

Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda’s story of Hollywood mistreatment went beyond the couch to after she had already been cast in the role. She explained to the BBC in March 2017, “I’ve been fired because I wouldn’t sleep with my boss.”

Lisa Rinna

Lisa Rinna revealed she lost out on a big TV role because she wouldn’t give a producer a “quickie.”

“‘Just pull your panties down and bend over and the role is yours,’ he said to me,” Rinna told Pop Eater. Rinna later saw the man at a red carpet event and called him out, “I know everyone in this town,” she reportedly told him, and if you ever do what you did to me again to anyone else I will tell everyone your dirty secret.”

Goldie Hawn

Goldie Hawn wrote in her 2005 autobiography that cartoonist Al Capp exposed himself to her when she was just 19 years old. When she refused his advances, Hawn wrote Capp became upset and told her she was “never gonna make anything in [her] life” and that she should “go and marry a Jewish dentist. [She’d] never get anywhere in this business.”

Joan Collins

Joan Collins wrote in her memoir Past Imperfect: An Autobiography that she lost out on the lead role in Cleopatra because she wouldn’t sleep with the studio head. Elizabeth Taylor ended up nabbing the role.

Marilyn Monroe

Maybe one of the first actresses to speak about Hollywood’s casting couch problem, Marilyn Monroe reportedly once described Hollywood as “an overcrowded brothel.” Rumor has it, Monroe wasn’t against trading sexual favors to climb up the Hollywood ladder. 

Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon revealed to Elle in a 2012 interview that she had a casting couch experience when she was just starting out in the business.

“It was not successful — for either of us. I just went into a room, and a guy practically threw me on the desk. It was my early days in New York, and it was really disgusting. It wasn’t like I gave it a second thought. It was so badly done.”