‘Sleepy Hollow’ Created an “Us Against Her” Environment for Star Nicole Beharie, ‘Burn It Down’ Book Claims
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The set of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow had “grueling” working conditions, confusion and “creative floundering” among its leadership, and disparate treatment between its white male and Black female lead, according to Burn It Down.
The Hollywood exposé from Maureen Ryan, published by HarperCollins and which hit shelves on Tuesday, alleges that Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison — who played detective Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane, respectively — “did not want to have a whole lot to do with each other,” according to one source who worked on the show, allegedly resulting in Mison’s character’s famous “courtly” bow, because the co-stars did not want to hug each other.
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That also allegedly translated to their onscreen narratives, according to showrunner Clifton Campbell, who told Ryan that Mison and Beharie “believed that the relationship between the characters should not evolve into a romantic relationship,” despite fan calls for one. (Neither Beharie nor Mison commented for the book.)
Burn It Down also claims that following alleged conflict between co-creator and director Len Wiseman and Beharie while filming the pilot, actress Lyndie Greenwood — who portrayed Beharie’s sister, Jenny Mills — was brought on as a potential replacement for the 42 and Shame actress.
Across one chapter of the book — which also includes reporting around other shows, including Lost, The Goldbergs and Saturday Night Live — Ryan details how one of Fox’s most popular and promising shows of 2013 fell apart, and allegedly created a hostile work environment for one of its stars amid creative mismanagement tensions and turnover between producers, creators, showrunners and Fox executives. Part of that, the book alleges, was driven by the happenings within the writers room, which Ryan notes had three people of color in season one, but had returned for season two with an all-white, male team outside a “sole woman of color.”
When speaking to TV’s Top 5 about the book, Ryan said it was uncovering the misconduct and bias in her Sleepy Hollow reporting, which she said “gives necessary and important context” to the trajectory of one of its star’s careers, that made her want to publish the book. “If there’s a thing that causes me to want to burn things down, it’s when people leave the industry or are essentially forced out of the industry or forced into, essentially, career hiatuses,” she told podcast co-hosts Lesley Goldberg and Daniel Fienberg. “Not due to a pattern of serious misconduct or serious unprofessionalism or serious transgressions of any kind, but because they feared for their mental health, their physical well-being, their safety, and their overall quality of life was terrible.”
Multiple sources told Ryan that people with power on the show claimed from early on they did not have “a good experience with Nicole,” but then spread that to others, including writers who had not worked with her. It was a “double standard,” as co-star Orlando Jones described it, with another source sensing she felt alone. “Especially if that person is a woman and a woman of color — those are two groups that already have challenges to begin with,” that same source told Ryan. “It created a very us-against-her environment from day one.”
Beharie was said to have prefaced statements with “I’m not trying to be difficult,” despite one source saying they never witnessed her being so. Or at least no more than Mison, who was allegedly described by a producer as “the star” and who another source described as “a handful” as well. “He had his own set of issues,” they said. “I’ve always said that on any other show, he would’ve been the biggest problem.”
Beharie previously addressed an alleged disparity in treatment between her and Mison, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2020 that while she and Mison were both sick during the filming of the show’s first season, he was allowed to return to the U.K., while she had to film an episode on her own, and ultimately ended up in urgent care.
According to sources who worked on the show, some of whom used their first or full names, Beharie showed a trepidation about the role, a massive and potentially multiyear undertaking. (Ryan likens this to James Gandolfini on the set of The Sopranos, as detailed in Difficult Men.) But both she and Mison had difficulty adjusting to being the leads of the show, with co-star Jones telling Ryan that both were “out of their depths” and “no one was helping them.”
Amid that, “there was a lot of creative floundering” from the show’s leadership team from the very beginning, one person who worked on the show told Ryan, noting early “red flags” over the way “problems were handled, and the way blame was assigned — or reassigned.” As both Mison and Beharie went “through steep learning curves that sometimes involved friction with colleagues” wrote Ryan, Beharie’s growing pains were treated differently.
“When a bunch of white guys say a person of color is difficult, I tend to assume that there’s a lot more to that story,” one source said. “I found her to be pleasant, extremely talented, and an actor who was adjusting to being a lead. There are growing pains with that. In the time I was there, where the discrepancy came in was how their growing pains were viewed and handled.”
Later, writer Shernold Edwards was hired on the show as it was being overseen by then-showrunner Campbell. Edwards alleges the experience turned “hellish,” with “a miserable vibe on set.” At one point, when she suggested she and Beharie get together to talk, Campbell “went off,” telling her she couldn’t talk to Beharie and calling the actress “crazy.” (Campbell denied he called Beharie “crazy,” stating that the allegation was “patently false” and that she was “professional” and “cordial and fun.” He also told Ryan that Mison and Beharie were treated the same on set during his season and “to protect evolving conversations as the studio began to look past season three and the ramifications for any subsequent seasons, I told the entire room not to share these ongoing discussions with any cast or crew.”)
A source who worked with Sleepy Hollow’s first showrunner, Mark Goffman, also alleged that there “were times when serious issues were brought not just to Mark, but to the powers that be, so to speak. And they either brushed them aside or they were just not handled.”
The book additionally addresses season one reports that Beharie had bitten a hairstylist on the show’s set. That stylist, Jones said, had been brought in to address issues Beharie had raised about how much money Sleepy Hollow was putting toward her wig versus Mison’s. (In a statement responding to a conversation among the show’s writers about Fox executives’ stances on Black hairstyles seen in the show, Campbell said there was initial resistance “on the studio level” to the actress donning her natural hair onscreen, but that request was eventually granted, and for Beharie’s final season, she “wore her own personal wigs, which she asked that we use.”)
Jones maintains he was with her in the hair and makeup trailer and never saw the incident, though he has a photo on his phone “in which Beharie pretended to bite” him as part of a joke. He also expressed that no “physical altercation could have occurred without someone seeing or noticing,” Ryan wrote. The stylist declined to “discuss in detail what happened on Sleepy Hollow with Beharie,” adding that, “I am writing about my experiences as well.” She went on to call her time on the show “one of the worst projects I have worked on as a hairstylist.”
These incidents and others were among a pattern within the show’s changing creative leadership, Ryan suggests. Including Campbell becoming “unproductively” emotional and defensive at times when Black writers made suggestions around elements of the scripts, potential unconscious bias being addressed by HR in terms of script assignments, and fans criticizing the show for its treatment of Beharie’s character.
The show had high turnover among its employees, with on-set hours often “brutal,” and key creatives in L.A. and Wilmington, North Carolina, both at odds and in over their heads from season one, one person who worked on the show told Ryan. That, they said, was due to those leaders being “conflict averse or unwilling to have tough conversations.”
“It was very tense, from pretty early on,” they added.
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