Bombshell, last year’s look at the women who helped expose former Fox News head Roger Ailes’ history of sexual harassment, could’ve been good. But, as we noted in our review, the film’s “kid-gloves approach” to its real-life subjects stripped the narrative of its innate complexity. “[T]he film is a snappy, glib tour of recent history in the Adam McKay mold,” we wrote, “hydroplaning through the stormy real-life events that led to Ailes’ departure from Fox News with windshield wipers on high and blinders strapped to each side of its head.”
Still, one wonders what the women depicted in the film, including former Fox anchor Megyn Kelly—played by Charlize Theron in the film—make of Jay Roach’s approach, which, as Kelly notes, was made without their input. Well, Kelly just posted a video to her YouTube channel in which she talks it through with fellow accusers Juliet Huddy, Rudi Bakhtiar, and Julie Zann, as well as her husband, Douglas Brunt. And while the film “got a lot right,” per the panel, everyone agrees that, well, it was actually even shittier.
“It was worse than that,” recalls a tearful Zann. “That was my immediate takeaway: ‘Oh, this is it. Wow, you really let Roger off easy.’”
Kelly agrees, noting that one of the film’s liberties included Ailes loving the press Kelly received after asking then-candidate Donald Trump about his insulting comments towards women at a 2015 debate. “He didn’t like the question at all,” she says. “And at one point he actually told me, ‘No more female empowerment stuff.’”
All that said, the scene in which Margot Robbie’s composite character is asked to “twirl” for Ailes struck a chord, and Kelly and Zann both recall the shame they felt after acquiescing to the request. “If you don’t get how demeaning that is, I can’t help you,” says Kelly. Huddy, meanwhile, remembers Ailes telling her to “turn around” during a staff meeting. “‘Let me see your ass,’” she recalls him saying.
Kelly also took an opportunity to reflect on that period of her life and career. “The truth is that I’ve looked back on my own life, every moment from that moment forward, and I do wish I had done more,” she says. “Even though I was powerless, even though it would have been a suicidal move career-wise. What if I had just said, ‘Screw it’?”
In lighter takeaways, Kelly enjoyed Mark Duplass’ performance as her husband, though the real Brunt would’ve preferred Dwayne Johnson. Har dee har.
Watch the fill video below.
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61 Comments
In all fairness, Megyn Santa-is-canonically-white Kelly is worse than Charlize made her seem, so it seems like it was pretty fair all around.
She’s “reformed” it’s now Megyn what’s-wrong-with-blackface Kelly.
To this day, I can’t get over how well Jon Stewart pegged Megyn Kelly nine years ago, both in her positive qualities (namely, her ability to effortlessly filet a doofus), and her negative qualities (namely, her breathlessly cynical ability to argue for whatever happens to advantage her at the moment). He really summed up the woman in five minutes before she even became a thing.
That bit is utterly flawless. Easily one of Stewart’s best.
He had a fantastic bit about Gretchen Carlson as well. Something about her saying she didn’t know what voir dire is and then running around in her lingerie giggling while playing touch football. His comments were basically “Bitch, you went went to Stanford. And Oxford. You know what the fuck voir dire is. Stop simpering because you like the camera.”
She’s basically Deirdre from Kimmy Schmidt.
Yeah, that was some bad bitch power moves Stewert was pulling there
That’s pretty much conservative white womanhood. First in line for their “earned” entitlements, nowhere near the line when it comes to making sure all Americans receive it equally.
I get what you’re saying, but it leads me to wonder what the point was of the movie going only halfway on everyone?Pro-Fox News people aren’t going to be happy about any kind of criticism. Anti-Fox News people are going to be mad about pulled punches. The few remaining people who like Alec Baldwin’s SNL Trump aren’t going to buy enough tickets to pay for the contracts of multiple stars. This kind of treatment doesn’t seem to shout out Oscar bait either.
It would seem like a profit minded studio exec would either create a sensation by telling the full appalling horror at Fox News, or wouldn’t bother at all.
Every time I’ve seen anything about it, it felt like a movie of the week a la Long Island Lolita just maybe a little less lurid. But, I haven’t seen it.
I don’t know who this movie was for it looks terrible and I can’t think of a group of women more unsympathetic. I can only assume this thing got made at all because of the named actors who are in it. Absent the star power /draw of the three women leads how does this thing even get funding for pre-production?
quite a few of those ladies dancing have asked to speak to the manager
I believe they are doing the “I would like to speak to a manager” dance. It starts out, “Um, um, excuse me”, “Um, um, excuse me”, “Um, um, excuse me”, “Um, um, excuse me”.
The rise of Karens
Kelly clearly just did a bong hit 15 minutes ago – sativa.And how is it that MJ is still illegal in NY: meantime NYC celebs brag on intagram about their weed use, but no Officer Gary ever knocks on their doors?Fuuuu… rich people need their own special plague.
“If you don’t get how demeaning that is, I can’t help you,” Me either, Megyn, me either.
These women should have had the opportunity to read the insultingly transparent lies of a right-wing propaganda organ without having to suffer that kind of humiliating abuse.
So the movie made heroes of these awful people and now they’re going to get a platform to be even more awful by saying how much worse it was for them in reality? Okay great, just checking.
failing UP
So you are saying that sexual harassment only matters when the victim is someone you approve of – got it.
No it’s a shame it occurred to them and they don’t deserve it. However they don’t seem to give a shit about other people that are victims, in fact they work for Fox News a network promotes harassment, assault and harm to minorities, women, the LGBT+ community by being propaganda for the GOP and Trump. They’re selfish and they’re hypocrites.
I understand – however, when people (and I’m sorry – especially men) throw around opinions that imply some women deserve to be sexually harassed, I find it really offensive, no matter who the woman is.
saying that they shouldn’t be made more rich and famous by selling their sexual harassment story to Hollywood and saying that they deserved to be sexually harassed are not the same thing.
I applaud your compassion, but they kinda totally deserve it.
Kelly specifically is a horrible person who used her platform to regularly rail against civil rights, gender equality and general human decency.Roger Ailes deserved to be punished for what he did to them.That doesn’t mean I have to pretend that Kelly is a human being worthy of my respect or immune to the criticism that she is obviously hustling for a buck by “telling her story”.Cause she spent her career proving she was born without any.
I think even for people who sympathize with them, it is difficult to suppress anger that they seemed more than happy to ignore what was happening when it didn’t affect them directly.
Maybe we’re saying that sexual harassment is hard to sympathize with when it happens to somebody who was actively contributing to a pro-sexual-harassment media/political regime, in exchange for lots and lots of money.
She was in on Donald Trump and his sexual harassment. Sorry but hypocrisy over rules that.
That isn’t at all what he said. I would, on the other hand, have no problem saying that these women got a healthy dose of karma. I have little to no sympathy for these women given the horribly racists, anti-immigrant and generally hateful propaganda they women were paid significant salaries to vomit on the daily.
Leopards Eating People’s Faces: The Movie
“The truth is that I’ve looked back on my own life, every moment from that moment forward, and I do wish I had done more,”I wonder if she wishes she hadn’t gotten spittle-sprayingly angry at the suggestion that Santa (and Jesus) weren’t white? I hope they put that moment in her obituary because it is so, so fucking stupid.That said, no one deserves to be sexually harassed at work, even if their job is spreading neo-nazi propaganda.
every moment from the twirl? Really?? That twirl was what made her reflect but still didn’t make her quit, go public, fight back, or bring suit against Fox & Ailes until some one else took those actions.
A big problem with forced arbitration is that ‘the twirl + whatever sexual demands follow’ situations are often buried and the culture that enabled this kind of environment is empowered to go on. The employees know that the arbitration is rarely ever going to be just, even if all of it was caught on camera + microphone. And in our ‘starvation wages for all’ work environment in the U.S., the question becomes ‘struggle against it and lose your home (making the kids homeless)‘ or ‘endure it so that normal life can continue for everyone but me.’This is why voting is important, so that those that rig the system against EVERYONE that isn’t already wealthy can’t continue to gain power. Vote in 2020, in both the primaries and general, vote the same in 2021, as those off-years help shape what’s available in other years, vote in 2022, 2023, etc.When you see that voting machine situations are bad, such as with Georgia, document it and get it seen everywhere. Fight the suppression that way.
I was in a focus group discussing trailers for this movie. There were 15 women. We all agreed that the movie looked interesting but we’d never watch it if Megyn Kelly was the sympathetic victim. Fuck her and her “I could have done more but I decided I liked being famous better” comments.
The line gets pretty fucking thin there, I’d say. Kelly was actively contributing to a media/political hybrid movement that was so, so obviously pro-sexual-harassment-of-women, and generally anti-woman in a variety of ways.While you might disagree as to whether Kelly actually inched over the line, let me offer the logical extreme: “nobody deserves to go to hell, even the people who designed it, created it, and expected everybody else to go there.”To me, that rings really, really hollow.
how about we all agree on Megyn can-just-fuck-OFF-now Kelly going fwd?
“[Trump] didn’t like the question at all,” she says. “And at one point he actually told me, ‘No more female empowerment stuff.’” Fuuu… It’s really hard to give up drinking after reading shit like this. Especially on a Friday.
I think that refers to Ailes, not Trump, but fu€k if I’m going to watch Megyn Kelly’s YouTube to confirm it.
Now that I re-read, it’s kind of hard to distinguish. They are both the Absolute Worst.
I don’t see how there’s any question. It was clearly Ailes.And that’s such a minor thing to latch onto, terrible as it is, given the context. Don’t your remember this whole kerfuffle? It was this line of questioning that Trump later described as “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/history-donald-trump-megyn-kelly-feud/story?id=36526503
If you are convinced that it is Ailes, I won’t argue.Oh hell yes, I remember it. And I’m sure that you don’t really see it as “minor.” But then men don’t want us to QUANTIFY their behavior, do they (as much as they love numbers)? They live by numbers, but they hate it when they have to answer the question “How many times? How many women/men?”Can we just agree that both of these men are unpardonable Monsters? Both of them (and so many others) have destroyed lives (in plain site) and will continue to be absolved?
Yes, it was definitely Ailes.As to the relatively minor comment:Trump attacks women. Megyn Kelly calls him out at the debate “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.” He responds with lies and complaints about political correctness.Later he attacks and belittles her on Twitter. As a follow-up, he goes on CNN with “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” And then this story apparently (to you adds) the fact that “[Trump] didn’t like the question at all,” she says. “And at one point he actually told me, ‘No more female empowerment stuff.’” Relative to what he actually did and said, that would’ve been a reasonable and measured response by Trump. Still a piece of shit, but much less bad than what he actually did. I don’t understand how it got you so upset, when the actual facts of the situation were so much worse.
You misquoted. Ailes is the one who didn’t want the female empowerment stuff. Not Trump.
Just remember…she went back to work the next day instead of going to a rival network to reveal that the head of a major network was personally dictating the way she treats a candidate .
“People who’ve helped to destroy the world are very unhappy—very unhappy indeed—when the world-destroyers they serve momentarily pause to destroy them a bit too.”
Is it Veep that has that quote “You have no future in conservative politics–you’re not blonde!”
The first half hour of the movie I was wondering when Theron would come on. Woah.Straight-laced McKinnon was a treat. Looking forward to more.Duplass… nice. Always nice.
I’m torn. On the one hand, this should happen to no one. On the other, she was and continues to be Megyn Kelly.
Juse watched this tonight and that’s what makes it hard to watch. Nobody should be treated this poorly, including the people that Kelly and Carlson treated this poorly.
they probably should have looked up what the nazi’s thought about women before joining an orginazation dedicated to bringing them back
Ding ding ding.“Women Suffer the Consequences of the Gender Roles They Champion”
i mean, even being charitable as hell and saying fox news is striving for a return to the fake 1950’s that rots every republicans minds, that still leaves them in a situation where casual work place groping is acceptable and expected. i’m too lazy but i bet someone could find one of these women denouncing mad men on air as some sort of liberal attack on white men.
Whenever I read about people like M. Kelly, people who have gone through something horrible and demeaning experience and look back with regret because the didn’t have the strength to stand up and say “No, it’s not worth it”, I wonder if at least some women did stand up at the time. Maybe they didn’t go in for the interview at all or maybe they refused some demeaning request by Ailes or his enablers and were cast aside never to be heard from again. Those women, if they exist, elected for career suicide over Kelly’s future regret by not debasing themselves. I’d like to hear from them for once.
Kelly also took an opportunity to reflect on that period of her life and career. “The truth is that I’ve looked back on my own life, every moment from that moment forward, and I do wish I had done more,” she says. “Even though I was powerless, even though it would have been a suicidal move career-wise. What if I had just said, ‘Screw it’?” Oh eat shit Megyn Kelly.This woman worked as a Nazi-for-hire until she smelled money elsewhere and changed here tune. No shock she didn’t really start talking about this until after her NBC show was shown to be stillborn.
Good illustration of why this film shouldn’t have been made. These horrible horrible women, these traitors to their gender, now get to seem like they spearheaded the Me Too movement. FUCK THAT
The cynical side of me thinks that this is just plain ol’ Fox Empathy Blindness, and Megyn Kelly is saying, “No, you don’t understand! It was worse in real life because it happened to ME!”
Haven’t seen this, not gonna see it, but my god every time I see that still I’m amazed at how completely and utterly they made Theron resemble Kelly.
Same. I don’t know how many times I saw commercials or other mentions of the movie before I realized that was Theron and Kelly herself wasn’t in it.
Today in “Leopards Ate my Face.”
Charlize did a great job playing Megyn. And watching “Megyn” and the way she was written and reading what real megyn says here…First she came off as calculating. Always wondering how she can leverage or to quote the movie “play” the situation to her advantage. I have more respect for Gretchen despite me not liking her politics. because Gretchen at least had the dignity to stay away from Fox news. Megyn went back. Sorry Megyn. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for you when you yourself said it in the movie: you sold your soul for a fat paycheque.