Thandie Newton has revealed she was groped by a male co-star during filming.
The 43-year-old actress — who has three children with husband Ol Parker — did not identify the co-star but revealed the incident took place between the birth of her first child in 2000 and her second child in 2004.
“I’ve literally been in situations where a co-actor has groped me and tried to engage me and I’m like, ‘What the hell, I’ve got one kid and a husband — what are you doing?’
“If I’d been an 18-year-old girl, desperate, I’m not sure. And attracted to him, let’s say. That could have turned into a situation.
“It’s a widespread problem in every single industry, in every single place,” she said.
Newton recently revealed that she was also taken advantage of by a director when she was auditioning at the beginning of her career.
She told W magazine: “A director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my breasts and think about the guy making love to me in the scene. 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.”
Newton added that many years later, at a film festival, a drunk producer approached her and said: “‘Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!’ And he lurched away looking really shocked that he’d said that.
“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.
“I was so naive when I started out and I see now that we have to prepare our kids — I’ve got two beautiful daughters; one is 16 one is 11. 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,” she said.
