Actress Raeden Greer has claimed she was fired from True Detective after refusing to go topless for a scene, following pressure from director Cary Joji Fukunaga.
Greer was cast to play an exotic dancer on the HBO series back in 2013, and says that after raising some concerns, was assured by her agent and the casting department that the role wouldn’t involve nudity because it wasn’t disclosed in her contract.
Speaking to The Daily Beast, Greer said: “I kept getting the answer from my agent and from casting – ‘no, that would be absolutely unheard of if they asked you to do nudity after it wasn’t disclosed. There was no rider, there was no negotiating this into your contract, that would not happen, so stop asking about it because it’s making you look amateurish.’ So, I was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna quit worrying about it’.”
On the day of filming however, Greer found nothing in her trailer but a set of pasties and a nude thong to wear.
After objecting to the outfit, Greer says Fukunaga and another producer on the show pulled her aside for a chat in an attempt to convince her.
“Cary said to me at that moment, ‘Everybody on this show goes topless. All the women on the show go topless. Your character is a stripper, so you have to,’” Greer said.
“He was trying different things to convince me that it’s not a big deal,” she added. “It [was] going to be very tasteful, or it’s just gonna be really insignificant in the background. I was like, ‘Well, if it’s so insignificant, why is he so insistent that I have to do this?’ It was just on and on and on with no budging.”
Greer says she was later fired from the role after refusing to back down, and described the experience as “degrading” and “humiliating”.
NME has reached out to Fukunaga’s representatives and HBO for comment.
The actress was motivated to come forward after seeing Fukunaga give interviews while promoting his latest film No Time To Die, where he discusses bringing a feminist viewpoint to the James Bond franchise.
Last month, Fukunaga told The Hollywood Reporter how he brought in Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge to help work on the script.
“From my very first conversations with [producer Barbara Broccoli], that was a very strong drive,” Fukunaga said. “You can’t change Bond overnight into a different person. But you can definitely change the world around him and the way he has to function in that world.
“It’s a story about a white man as a spy in this world, but you have to be willing to lean in and do the work to make the female characters more than just contrivances.”
The post ‘True Detective’ actress claims she was fired for refusing nude scene after director Cary Joji Fukunaga pressured her appeared first on NME.