An actress is claiming that No Time To Die director Cary Fukunaga pressured her to appear topless in the show True Detective, and she was fired when she refused.
Raeden Greer said she wanted to share her story because Fukunaga recently talked about his efforts to bring the latest James Bond movie into the #MeToo world. Fukunaga said that the Bond of today could never treat women the way the character used to.
“That wouldn’t fly today,” Fukunaga said. He added that he hired Phoebe Waller-Bridge to help punch up the script and make sure women in the film are “more than just contrivances.”
Despite this, Greer said that’s exactly how she was treated on the set of the HBO show, which aired in 2014 and was a critical and commercial smash. Greer said when she protested, despite having a no-nudity clause in her contract, she was let go.
“It was disheartening. It felt bad,” Greer said. “You can’t just treat people like all you are is a pair of tits, that is very hurtful.”
Greer was excited when she landed the role on the show, and she hoped it would lead to bigger things. Maybe it would even be her big break. She said she went back and forth with her agent many times about there not being any nudity in the role.
“So, I started asking after that, like, ‘To be clear, there’s no nudity involved in this role, right?’ 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.’”
She was going to play a local woman named Kelsey Burgess who worked at a strip club in the fourth episode of the series. The actress would have had back and forth dialogue with star Woody Harrelson.
When she arrived to film, she said, there were only pasties and a nude thong laid out for her. Then she asked to talk to someone because she was frantic.
Fukunaga and a producer pulled her outside to talk to her. She said he pressured her to appear naked in the scene.
“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 didn’t stop there, she said.
“He was trying different things to convince me that it’s not a big deal,” she says. “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.”
Once she put her foot down, the men agreed with her and Greer said she thought they were going to work it out. She sat in her trailer until a producer came and told her they gave the part to an extra.
“I feel like if it was an actor, somebody they respected, that it would have been handled differently,” she said. “They could have easily just said from the beginning, this role requires nudity. They could have negotiated it into my contract, they could have given me the nudity rider, so I knew what to expect instead of just putting this on me on the day, just assuming that I’m a desperate young girl who’s going to do whatever they tell me to do.”
Greer has since appeared in Magic Mike XXL and an episode of NCIS: New Orleans, among other roles.