Back in 2014, Rebel told The Kyle and Jackie O Show, “Sacha is so outrageous. Every single day, he’s like, ‘Rebel, can you just go naked in this scene?’ And I’m like, ‘No!’ Sacha and I have the same agent in America, and I’m like, ‘Sacha, I’m going to call our agent Sharon and tell her how much you are harassing me.’ Every day, he’s like, ‘Just go naked, it will be funny. Remember in Borat when I did that naked scene? It was hilarious.’ On the last day, I thought I’d obviously won the argument, and he got a body double to do the naked scene. Then in the last scene…he was like, ‘Rebel, can you just stick your finger up my butt?’ And I went, ‘What do you mean, Sacha? That’s not in the script.’ And he’s like, ‘Look, I’ll just pull down my pants, you just stick your finger up my butt, it’ll be a really funny bit.’…You don’t wanna be a diva, so I…said, ‘I’ll slap you once on the butt, and that’s it.'”
Ten years later, Sacha’s reps told Variety, “While we appreciate the importance of speaking out, these demonstrably false claims are directly contradicted by extensive detailed evidence, including contemporaneous documents, film footage, and eyewitness accounts from those present before, during, and after the production of The Brothers Grimsby.”
Kiernan Culkin said, “It’s hard for me to actually describe his process because I don’t really see it. He puts himself in a bubble…[His self-isolation] might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.”
Brian Cox said, “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous. I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare…Actors are funny creatures. I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
Two years later, however, Brian told Town & Country that being around an actor who’s constantly in character is “fucking annoying.” He said, “Don’t get me going on it.”
Around the same time, Jeremy referred to the viral New Yorker piece as his “15 minutes of shame, with a long tail.” He told GQ, “I hadn’t felt judged like that in a very long time…I was less bothered by other actors having feelings or opinions about the way I work. Really, it was just feeling exposed.”
6.
In 2021, a resurfaced story about Lucy Liu standing up to Billy Murray on the Charlie’s Angels set went viral. She told the LA Times’ Asian Enough podcast, “As we’re doing the scene, Bill starts to sort of hurl insults, and I won’t get into the specifics, but it kept going on and on. I was, like, ‘Wow, he seems like he’s looking straight at me.’ I couldn’t believe that [the comments] could be towards me, because what do I have to do with anything majorly important at that time? I literally do the look around my shoulder thing, like, who is he talking to behind me? I say, I’m so sorry. Are you talking to me?’ And clearly he was, because then it started to become a one-on-one communication.”
She continued, “Some of the language was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I was not going to just sit there and take it. So, yes, I stood up for myself, and I don’t regret it. Because no matter how low on the totem pole you may be or wherever you came from, there’s no need to condescend or to put other people down. And I would not stand down, and nor should I have.”
The impact of that moment carried on years down the line. She continued, “I remember years later, maybe even decades later, some crew members that I didn’t even know at the time came up to me on other sets and told me that they were there at the time and they were really grateful that I did that. I have nothing against Bill Murray at all. I’ve seen him since then at a SNL reunion, and he came up to me and was perfectly nice. But I’m not going to sit there and be attacked.”