Mira Sorvino has claimed that a casting director gagged her during an audition at the age of 16.
The Oscar-winning star of Mighty Aphrodite revealed in an interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s podcast that she was auditioning for a horror movie when the situation got out of hand.
“In looking back over at my career, I realised that one of my very first auditions when I was 16, I was completely treated inappropriately by the casting director,” she said. “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.”
She continued: “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?”
In the same podcast, Sorvino also called out “one big director” who she says “has Oscars” and is known for his “social justice profile” who ended an audition by saying: “You know, as I look at you my mind can’t help but travelling from the artistic possibilities to the sexual.”
Sorvino had previously come forward with her own story about disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, alleging that he sexually harassed her. Peter Jackson later revealed that Weinstein had told him not to consider her for a role in The Lord of the Rings as she was difficult to work with.
The actor has also apologised for working with Woody Allen on Mighty Aphrodite, the film that won her an Oscar for best supporting actress. In January, she penned an open letter to his daughter Ronan Farrow, who claims that he molested her as a child.
“I cannot begin to imagine how you have felt, all these years as you watched someone you called out as having hurt you as a child, a vulnerable little girl in his care, be lauded again and again, including by me and countless others in Hollywood who praised him and ignored you,” Sorvino wrote for the Huffington Post. “As a mother and a woman, this breaks my heart for you. I am so, so sorry!”
Sorvino was recently seen in the mini-series Condor and her upcoming roles include thriller Look Away with Jason Isaacs and comedy Stuber with Dave Bautista.
