Dune 2 star Rebecca Ferguson recently recounted the story of how she had to let a certain co-star know she wasn’t going to take any more of their rotten behavior.
Ferguson stopped by on the newest episode of the podcast Reign With Josh Smith to discuss her career thus far and how she “uses her voice.” One such incident where she had to speak up for herself, she told Smith, was when she was berated by an “absolute idiot” of a co-star on set, whom she wouldn’t name.
“It’s not Hugh [Jackman]. Not Tom Cruise,” Ferguson said, referencing her roles with the stars in The Greatest Showman and Mission Impossible franchise, respectively. “I’ve done many movies back in the day,” she said, adding that the interaction took place in “the last 10 or 12 years.”
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“Doesn’t matter who it is. [I’m] gonna try and not give this away,” she added before going on to describe the behavior that made her have to tell that co-star to “fuck off.”
“This human being was being so insecure and angry because this person couldn’t get the scenes out,” she said. Ferguson said that when she felt “vulnerable and comfortable” enough to say something about the behavior, she was “screamed” at. “But because this person was number one on the call sheet, there was no safety net for me,” she added.
Once she realized that no one on set was going to stand up for her—“No one had my back,” she said—she started to cry, after which she was berated further, according to her retelling of the incident. “This person would literally look at me in front of the whole crew and say ‘You call yourself an actor? This is what I have to work with? What the fuck is this?’ And I stood there just breaking.”
Ferguson decided to handle the situation differently when she returned to set the next day. What happened next, she said, was her proudest moment of standing up for herself.
“The next day I walked on and I said, ‘You get off my set,’” she told Smith. “It was the first time I’d ever spoken [back to that person]. I was so scared. And I looked at this person and said ‘You can fuck off.’”
She did the rest of her scene with that person while facing the back of their head because producers wouldn’t allow her to send the “number one” away from the set. “I said, ‘The person can turn around and I can act to the back [of his] head,’” she recalled. “And I did.”
“I have no problem using my voice and I’m not scared of the consequences of saying what I think.”
Besides Jackman and Cruise, Ferguson’s “number one on the call sheet” co-stars during the time period she indicated included Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Hercules, Jake Gyllenhaal in Life, Michael Fassbender in The Snowman, Ewan McGregor in Doctor Sleep and Chris Hemsworth in Men in Black: International. Of course, it’s always possible she had to act opposite Meryl Streep’s back in 2016’s Florence Foster Jenkins.
