Harvey Weinstein comes out of hiding just long enough to “Well, actually” Gwyneth Paltrow
Aux Features Harvey WeinsteinYou would think a person out on bail amid rape charges would take this time to reflect quietly on his life and choices, but if there were ever a shining example of grotesquely shitty judgment, it would be Harvey Weinstein.
Twenty years after her Best Actress Oscar win for Shakespeare In Love, Gwyneth Paltrow sat down with Variety to chat about how the moment impacted her life forever. She mentioned in passing that Weinstein originally wanted Ben Affleck to step in as the role of Shakespeare but reconsidered after Paltrow insisted that the role remain with a British actor.
After two decades, such a detail would be relegated to a throwaway trivia point mere minutes after reading it. Yet, Weinstein took such umbrage with Paltrow pointing out one of his least egregious missteps to deny something that very few people cared about.
“The only other contenders for the role of Will Shakespeare were Russell Crowe and Ethan Hawke, no one else,” Weinstein’s rep noted in an official statement. “Ben Affleck did a terrific job as Ned Alleyn, which is the role he was considered for.”
Rather than leaving it there, Weinstein’s rep Juda Engelmayer decided to throw just a little more gas onto the dumpster fire by sending a follow-up message to Variety.
“Just to ask—why wouldn’t you ask us anything here,” he asked. “If someone is a box-office draw, a good agency and good actor will get chosen for a role—blacklisting someone is just a bullshit idea convenient to beat the drum against Weinstein with.”
Now that they’ve managed to get that out of their systems, maybe Weinstein and his team can focus on more important matters, like his sexual assault trial in June.
[Via Vulture]
87 Comments
I got a Goop notification for this?
Getting any Goop notification is your own fault.
You’re notified that Harvey Weinstein just gooped on you.
eww
You’re notified that Harvey Weinstein just gooped on you.must’ve been standing near a house plant
How did you receive it?
It’s always nice seeing a callback to the pre Kinja days when, well, when we didn’t have to use Kinja.
IRON EAGLE
CancerAIDS
right?????
WTF does that last bit even mean other than, “I am a huge juicy turd of a person who has zero impulse control,”?
Probably that anybody, even Harvey Weinstein, is still more credible than Gooper Palgoop.
Not everything has a double meaning.
The combination of the heading and header image made me picture a troll peeking out from its underground burrow to see if it’s safe to come out now …
Did he see his shadow a few weeks back? Or was that a different thing? 🤔
I’m not sure “Russell Crowe as William Shakespeare” shows the greatest casting sense, either. I like Crowe; in the right role he can be great. But as a dashing William Shakespeare in what’s essentially a romantic comedy? That sounds like a terrible idea.
I thought Joseph Fiennes was…well…fine.
BECAUSE HE WAS LOADED, OKAY?
This isn’t the bloated sack of crap that is today’s Crowe, this was 1997-era Crowe who was coming off “L.A. Confidential” which made him one of the hottest properties out there.
The fight scenes would be great, though.
I’ve always wanted to see William Shakespeare throw a telephone at Richard Burbage.
Well he could pull off the accent. Anyone who says he can’t do accents has got dead ears mate.
And I’m sure RC would be more than happy to engage in some friendly fisticuffs to prove his point with any takers
Well, time to go listen to Gaelic Storm’s The Night I Punched Russell Crowe again.
Affleck couldn’t pull off the accent for sure! Can’t believe he was considered. Russell crow has had some amazing roles, but I can’t remember any in a British accent. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe you, just can’t remember. Fiennes was a good choice.
he’ll always be Romper Stomper to me
Yup, in the right role Russell Crowe can be great, but William Shakespeare? I wouldn’t buy it. He was awful as Robin Hood.
“Ben Affleck did a terrific job as Ned Alleyn…”What ever happened to this Ben fellow?
And why are gifs getting cut off??
Gifroy Was Here
That’s just beautiful.
Well, Paltrowally…
He did come across as quite Paltrownising.
Weinsplaining.
I nearly spit out my jade egg!
Are you in Bangkok?
“Spit.”
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Weinstein, The Goop enters the fray. Sheesh.
How in the fuck is this piece of trash out on bail?
Or am I just going to end up depressed when I find out that most accused serial rapists get out on bail?
Finally. Been waiting 20 years to hear this.
Kevin Smith was also going to direct until it was pointed out that he’s incompetent. So he directed something else.
The script as written didn’t have enough dick and fart jokes.
Self-referential dick and fart jokes.
“Remember when I did those dick and fart jokes? Those sure were dick and fart jokes.” – – Kevin Smith during a Q&A, probably.
Fan base: “Oh, my God. This guy! Please stop! We can’t breathe!”
Which is weird, for something about ol’ Shakey.
“Then I fuck them in a very uncomfortable place.”“The back of an ox-wagon?”
“Verily, knave, a schooner is a sailing-boat!”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for Sega.”
That second part of this confused me so much so I went to go find the original statement to see what the hell he is talking about. The way it’s written here it makes it sound like Weinstein was trying to blacklist Ben Affleck. The publicist was responding to this part of the Variety article:“Paltrow is honest about her own struggles with the volcanic producer. “He was a bully,” she says. “I never had a problem standing up to him. I wasn’t scared of him. I also felt for a period of time, I was the consumer face of Miramax, and I felt it was my duty to push back against him. We had a lot of fights.” She doesn’t believe that Weinstein’s involvement with “Shakespeare in Love” tarnishes the picture’s legacy. “It’s a beautiful film,” she says. “A movie is not going to be successful if it’s not a good movie, not like that.”
And this was the publicists statement, which I found in the Guardian: “Just to ask – why wouldn’t you ask us anything here,” it read. “When will the media … shit about Harvey fade out and when will actual reporting and investigating become something revered again? When Paltrow says, ‘A movie is not going to be successful if it’s not a good movie, not like that,’ you take it as gospel, but when someone accuses Harvey of shenanigans the same sentiment is ignored in place of something more sinister, why is that?“Just as a good movie is a good movie, if someone is a good actor, you can’t keep her or him down. If someone is a box office draw, a good agency and good actor will get chosen for a role – blacklisting someone is just a bullshit idea convenient to beat the drum against Weinstein with.”So those two quotes are about two different things. Also, this makes the defense of him look even worse.
Thank you for clarifying this! Just as an FYI: His publicist Juda Engelmayer is a male (because of course he is). I had to google it to find out what kind of terrible person would take that role. He actually has this quote on his FB profile: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun.”
Why am I not surprised that he’s a Billy Joel fan?
I’ve heard this before and am still unsure what it means.
Hey, let’s keep Billy out of this!(also, the rest of that lyric is of course “Only the good die young…” Which, I dunno, maybe is a sneaky dig at Old Man Weinstein?
Right?! Jeez. Billy is just trying to talk a Catholic girl into sleeping with him against the wishes of her mother. Which seems worse now I see it written down but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t envisioning raping her or ruining her career.
I mean sure, it’s much worse when Billy Joel sings it NOW, but back then if you looked at him you’d be like, “yeah, good luck with that, pal…”
Yeesh.
Now they’re fucking Billy Joel too, smh.
he’d rather laugh at the rape victims than cry over their painhell, Trump’s nickname for Chuck Schumer is “Cryin’ Chuck” because Schumer cried over dead refugee children…what a wimp! Typically holy democrat pretending he doesn’t like to murder children amirite?
Thank you for doing the research for me. I thought Juda was a female name and was trying to imagine the black hole of a soul it would take to be a woman defending him (though I’m still appalled by him as a human.)
Paltrow being a little full of shit vs a sexual predator being COMPLETELY full of shit. I mean, Paltrow is insufferable and I have no doubt she would lie about this tiny, inconsequential thing. But, yeah, THAT scumbag “correcting the record” isn’t really the right look.
Also, it sounds more like Paltrow was referring to how the film stands up outside of Weinstein’s publicity campaign for it, rather than whether the allegations against him taint the film. (It’s ambiguous since the article’s talking about both these things at this point.) Which makes the publicist’s response look like an even worse tangent again.
This STILL took me several reads to understand, but I think I get it:
-Paltrow said, “a [thing] can’t be hugely successful if it isn’t high quality.”-Weinstein’s rep construed that with its inverse, “a [thing] that’s high quality will always be hugely successful, no matter what”-Weinstein’s rep then leapt from that fallacy to, “thus, it is impossible to blacklist a good actor, which Weinstein has been accused of doing, though not in the thing I’m responding to”-This is somehow outrageous to Weinstein and his rep.
Am I close?
I think so. Honestly, the second part of the rep’s statement is pretty nuts and out of left field.
“When will the media … shit about Harvey fade out and when will actual reporting and investigating become something revered again?”Yes, if there’s one thing that has defined Harvey Weinstein as a person and as a professional it’s his reverence for reporting and investigating:https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/nov/07/harvey-weinstein-hired-ex-mossad-agents-to-suppress-abuse-allegations-new-yorker-report-claims
I mean, of course you have to be a shameless piece of human garbage to be Harvey Weinstein’s publicist, but playing the “why don’t you do some reporting?” card here is lower than snakeshit even by that standard.
Thank you for your services to quote-spelunkery! In context, at least the publicist is making a tiny bit of sense. He still sounds like The Mooch’s dumber and more evil brother, but he’s not foaming at the mouth bananas, ranting at clouds like the article made him sound.
Thank you, I read it three times and didn’t know what I was missing. It makes zero sense as written.
Nice accent Goopy. What part of Canada are you supposed to be from?
“Weinstein’s rep Juda Engelmayer”Honestly can’t think of a shittier job.
In fall 2017, yeah. Now it’s probably pretty easy.
To be fair, if there were two people I’d like to see battle each other to their mutual deaths, Weinstein and Paltrow are high up there. They are both stains on humanity.
Eh, I don’t think anything she has done that s as bad as being a serial rapist.
Well, some of the products she sells are not only ineffective, but actually dangerous. And I don’t think she is stupid enough to honestly believe she is helping people — she is essentially the same as the 19th-century quack medicine sellers — willingly endangering the health of others for profit.
I’d much rather he’d settle the issue of whether the legend of Paltrow swiping the role from her ex-bestie Winona Ryder is in fact true.
I love Winona as only a Gen-Xer can, and I find GP as annoying as anyone must who has ears and can read, BUT GP can do a decent British accent and WR really can’t.
I’m inclined to agree. After “Bram Stroker’s Dracula”, Winona lost all British accent privileges in movies.
I’m not sure what’s happening here. Is he “well actuallying” her, or is he just correcting something that she misunderstood about his thought process? I dislike Harvey Weintstein as much as anyone else (obviously), but I’m not sure what exactly the lede is here. This whole exchange could have been “relegated to a throwaway trivia point mere minutes after reading it” if people weren’t writing stories about it.
The world’s response to Weinstein captured below:
So, a man not found GUILTY yet of anything has no right to go on with his life as though he were Innocent without assholes like you berating him for “acting”Innocent? You’re scum.
I knew somebody who was totally fine when he went to work for Harvey back in the day. But when he finally left, he had a permanent stutter from all the stress. True story.
Fucking Jews. Always stirring the pot. I have no love for this cunt Paltrow, but Jews are the fucking WORST.
Talk about stories with no heroes…
Can we just agree that if any Actor deserves to get “well actulied” its Gwyneth Paltrow.