” I wanted to tell them we were better than this.”
You know Minnie Driver from classic films like Good Will Hunting, Grosse Pointe Blank, and GoldenEye.
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Minnie has a new memoir out, Managing Expectations, and in it (via The Times) she recalls an early point in her career when a casting director made an inappropriate request on set.
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Minnie recalls auditioning for a TV commercial for chocolates, when a casting director asked her if she’d seen the infamous scene in When Harry Met Sally, where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm at a diner.
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“You know the scene where she fakes an orgasm?” he asked, “Eat a piece of chocolate and do that…Unless you fancy having a real one.”
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“I thought about all the girls waiting outside,” she recalled. “All of us vying for an opportunity that was actually humiliation dressed up in a pick-me! outfit. I wanted to run out there and warn them.”
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“I wanted to tell them we were better than this, better than being lunchtime entertainment for a bunch of pervy execs, their perviness sanctioned by this being considered ‘work.’”
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“But of course I didn’t, because the fire was lit and it required fuel, and any fuel, however troubling, will burn just the same.”
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Minnie also noted that she was asked to fake an orgasm several times by the director, and that the chocolate tasted “revolting” — which led her to put her foot down. “I don’t think I can do it again…because I will throw up,” she said.
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THE RICHES,Minnie Driver, ‘Friday Night Lights’, (Season 2, episode 2, aired March 25, 2008), 2007-08. photo: Prashant Gupta / ©FX / courtesy Everett Collection
“They thought I was talking about the chocolate, but it was really my shame at having gone along with the whole grotesquery. And the fucking chocolate.”
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According to Minnie, the casting director — who she dubbed “Scorsleazy,” a pun on director Martin Scorsese’s last name — replied, “‘Well, all the other girls have apparently very much enjoyed this.’”
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“I gathered the good coat I’d worn off the floor, smiled mightily and said, ‘They were faking it.’ As exits go, it wasn’t bad.”
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