Olivia Munn Says ‘Obnoxious’ Male Co-Star Wouldn’t Let Her ‘Save’ Him On-Screen

Olivia Munn is opening up about her experience with a male actor who felt uncomfortable with a film’s seemingly feminist slant. 

Appearing on The Drew Barrymore Show this week, the X-Men: Apocalypse actor said she’d pledged long ago to focus on film and TV projects featuring female characters who weren’t reliant on their male counterparts. 

One such project, Munn said, required her to appear alongside a male co-star who objected to a scene in which his character’s life would be spared, thanks to Munn’s character’s aid.  

“If you read the script, it was that he was guarding his side, I was guarding my side, then we switch sides and then there’s a guy that was coming for him — he was gonna shoot him in the back — so I shoot him,” she recalled. “And then we’re about to shoot, and somehow, I guess he didn’t read the script, and in that moment, he realised, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. She can’t save me. No, no. She can’t save me.’”

Watch Munn’s Drew Barrymore Show appearance below. 

Though Munn did not identify the co-star by name, she described his subsequent on-set behaviour as “obnoxious,” noting that he quickly grew “combative with the director.” After the actor delayed the shoot for about 45 minutes, Munn decided to reframe the specifics of the scene to meet her co-star’s approval. 

“I said, ‘OK, how about instead of my character saving you, it’s just that we switch because it’s time for us to switch and so this is my guy to get,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘OK.’”

She went on to note: “Now here’s the interesting thing: Nothing changed. It’s just what he thought. I was doing the exact same thing.”

Munn, who is married to actor-comedian John Mulaney, has been outspoken about having endured less-than-optimal treatment on Hollywood sets for some time. 

Appearing on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast last year, she recalled an unnamed director on HBO’s The Newsroom who smeared her work ethic after she disagreed with his suggestions of how her character, Sloan Sabbith, would behave alongside Don Keefer (played by Thomas Sadoski) in a scene. 

“I was on the one-yard-line for the movie and my manager calls me and says, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get the role. But first, I guess there’s another director who they know and he says that on ‘The Newsroom’ you were late all the time and really combative,’” she said at the time. “I was like, ‘I know who this is.’”

These days, Munn can be seen on the Apple TV+ crime drama series Your Friends & Neighbours, which also stars Jon Hamm. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published last week, she said she hoped to set an example for other female actors by standing up for herself in the film industry. 

“I can’t change the world and I cannot change how women have been portrayed and received for however long we’ve been on earth,” she told the outlet. “So I’ve realised that I’m going to handle [these situations] in a way that is going to be the best outcome for me.”