(PHOTO CREDIT: The Drew Barrymore Show/YouTube)
Olivia Munn recently shared a wild experience during an appearance on Drew Barrymore’s show, The Drew Barrymore Show. She revealed that during the filming of a project, one of her male co-stars refused to perform a scene in which her character saves him, causing production to stop for close to 45 minutes.
Munn has often played strong, action-oriented roles such as CIA agents or police officers. In one such scene, she and her co-star were fighting side by side inside a bunker.
The script called for both characters to guard their respective sides and then switch positions at a certain point. During that moment, an attacker comes up behind her co-star and is about to shoot him — but Munn’s character steps in and shoots the attacker first.
Right before filming began, though, the co-star pushed back on the scene. He wasn’t willing to accept that his character would be saved by a woman. He shut down the shoot and started arguing with the director, repeatedly insisting that it wasn’t going to happen.
That held things up for nearly 45 minutes. Munn eventually floated a workaround: instead of clearly showing her character saving him, the scene could be tweaked so it just looked like they switched positions and the attacker happened to become her target. The co-star got on board with that, and filming picked back up.
This isn’t the first time Munn has talked about a rough experience on set. On Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, she shared that a director from HBO’s “The Newsroom” tried to damage her reputation.
Munn said that when she was close to landing a film role, her manager told her that another director had claimed she was always late and hard to work with on “The Newsroom.” She pushed back hard on that, saying she was never late — especially since she lived just seven minutes from the set.
She said she knew exactly who made those claims and believed it was a deliberate move to tank her chances. Munn asked her team to set the record straight with the filmmakers, and she did end up getting the role.
Still, she said the whole thing stuck with her — because someone had gone out of their way to hurt her career over nothing more than a difference in how they worked.
