Game of Thrones ' Lena Headey Says Refusing Harvey Weinstein’s Advances Hurt Her Career
By now, the word's out about Harvey Weinstein: Actresses' stories about former Hollywood heavyweight producer allegedly harassing and assaulting them helped catalyze the #MeToo movement's 2017 shift into high gear. What played out would not only expose and take down Weinstein, who continues to deny the allegations, but many (many) other high-profile men. Now, Lena Headey, who plays ice queen Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, has talked in more detail about her experiences with Weinstein, alleging that he hurt her career for a decade.
Headey had previously opened up in an October 2017 series of tweets about her interactions with him. In 2005, she tweeted, he made a suggestive comment to her at the Venice Film Festival, which she laughed off. Some time after, she wrote, he asked her to come up to his hotel room to get a script. Her body, she wrote, "went into high alert," and Headey said that she spoke up for herself: "I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen." He apparently became "furious," and when his room key didn't work, Headey wrote, he walked her back to the elevator, holding her arm tightly and telling her not to speak to anyone about it.
After these incidents, Headey says, she was virtually iced out of her career for almost a decade. She told The Sunday Times that refusing the advances she alleges meant she barely saw any roles from Miramax, the studio Weinstein co-founded.
“After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘Fuck, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life,’ because I did two jobs for Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing,” she told the newspaper.
A decade with little to no work is hard on anyone, but luckily Headey landed on her feet with one of the biggest roles on one of the biggest shows on television. Weinstein, on the other hand, has recently lost his defense lawyer and is due back in court March 7 for a pre-trial hearing after being indicted last May on charges of rape. His trial, which now includes five charges of sexual assault, is scheduled to begin in May.
