Mira Sorvino was gagged with a condom by a casting director at her very first audition in Hollywood.
The 50-year-old detailed the shocking incident in an interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s In Conversation podcast on Wednesday (11Jul18),
The Oscar-winning actress, who has become one of the faces of the #MeToo movement when it was revealed she was sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein, said that she was treated “inappropriately” by an unnamed casting director when she was just 16.
“In order to scare me for this horror movie scene, he tied me to a chair, he bruised my arm, and I was 16 years old, and then he gagged me, and I was all game because I’m trying to be scared for the scene,” Mira alleged.
“And at the end he takes the gag out of my mouth and he said, ‘Sorry for the prophylactic,’ so he had gagged me with a condom. I was too young to even know, thank God, what a condom tasted like.
“It was so inappropriate, and what the heck was a casting director doing with a condom in his pocket in an audition?” she added.
Mira went on to explain that she was taught in the movie industry that because she was young, she shouldn’t question anything that made her uncomfortable.
“When you’re young, you’re like, ‘Oh OK, I’ve got to be tough, I’ve got to be down to really perform, and if that means they need me to go this extra mile’ - and you see many times we have awards given to people for giving particularly raw performances in very brutal, sexual scenes or things like that,” Mira explained.
“People take advantage of that. People have always taken advantage of that... Like nude scene days or love scene days - all of a sudden contracts being thrown out the window,” she added. “Directors pressuring you to have relationships with them, people casting you saying if you have a sexual relationship with them they’ll give you the part.”
