It’s obviously pretty subjective, but relatively speaking I’d say yes. Eliza is a “TV quality” actress and she’s very okay. She’s unlikely to ruin a show but being the lead on Dollhouse was probably beyond her capabilities. Carpenter is outright atrocious. I’d say their respective IMDB pages paint a pretty clear picture.
To be fair, maybe she just refused to blow Harvey Weinstein.
According to her, she was fired from a recurring role on Bull (that was intended to become a regular role the following season) after complaining about sexual harassment by series star Michael Weatherly. CBS must have thought there was something to it, as they reached a settlement to pay her $9.5 million (her expected salary as a regular over four years).
edit: ninjaed by @mahaloth.
There’s nothing notable about this. Certainly an abuser doesn’t demonstrate abusive behavior in front of every single person in the world.
I definitely remember people on the nerdier side wearing T-shirts saying “Joss Whedon is my master now” at one point, probably shortly after Firefly came out… he was definitely one of the gods of nerd culture. That said, the quote is a reference to Star Wars, not in any way a literal pledge of fealty, and I don’t remember him being one of those people who crossed over from “we really like his work” to “we know all about him as a person and he is a paragon of awesomeness”, the way that people currently think about (for instance) Keanu. (Not to say there was NONE of that.)
The article itself, however, talks about how much devotion there was to Whedon at the time of Buffy and such. There were college classes created to study his work. And, yes, t-shirts and such that praised him. He was this amazing feminist, empowering women.
I didn’t actually hear anything negative about him until Dollhouse, with some people noticing the creepier aspect of the show and wondering if it said anything about Whedon. At the time I didn’t think much of it. But, looking back, it does seem like it tells us a lot about how he thinks.
I figure that if people weren’t doing at least a little bit of this hero-worship of Whedon, there wouldn’t be nearly the outcry with the recent revelations.
Plus, people refer to the “Whedonverse”, which isn’t really something that they do to other writers, save maybe Kevin Smith, and his is more because almost all his stuff is set in the same universe.
Ms. Trachtenberg doesn’t owe us more details than she wants to share. Mr. Whedon would probably not benefit from sharing more details so we’ll just have to live without knowing.
It’s possible the rule was imposed (by her parents, I presume?) to protect Ms. Trachtenberg from the sorts of things that had happened to other young actresses on the set. It’s possible Ms. Trachtenberg never directly experienced them and doesn’t fully know what they were so she can’t accurately say more. In her discretion (and possibly at the advice of PR agents or lawyers) she shouldn’t say more if it is all based on rumors rather than her personal experience. And it’s possible Mr. Whedon doesn’t want to explain the genesis of the rule because he would then have to admit or deny the rumors, which look bad enough already. Clearly, even his denials and defenses need some work.
Right.
Whedon was reportedly willing to berate people in front of crowds. Merely having any other person in the room wouldn’t be a very strong protection for Ms. Trachtenberg from that particular risk. Worse yet if the other person in he room was someone who worked for him. No, the rule seems to be intended to protect against only the sort of activity that Whedon absolutely would not do if there was any other witness.
She has said so little, she really can’t be accused of lying unless there never was such a rule.
This seems unlikely to me. I can’t imagine she would want to use innuendo to damage the career of a person who was in a powerful position to help her and who had never presented a career or personal risk to her or women in her position.
She might not have had a lot of other options. Acting is a tough business.
Perhaps, but it’s also possible that Whedon abused only some people.
You could say that just goes to show how low the bar was to clear, I suppose.
She didn’t come out and say anything until AFTER Carpenter and Fisher made their statements. And by that point Whedon was well out of her career and on his way out of all projects. She had nothing professionally to protect at the time she spoke out. Her unwillingness to provide detail is bizarre in that context unless, as you suggest, nothing at all ever directly happened to her. In fact her statements seem to amplify what Carpenter has said and added an undercurrent of criminality to the discussion which wasn’t there in Carpenter’s statements. That she made them as a subtweet pretty strongly argue in favor of this being part of a public relations campaign.
As long as Whedon is making films, he still has the potential to be in her career. And as long as he has some fans in Hollywood, he has the potential to make films. Many men in Hollywood will be unsettled by Ms. Trachtenberg criticizing her former boss and, if they remember this incident at all, they might just find an excuse to pass her over for some future role. She does no favors to her career by criticizing Whedon.
Frankly, that’s a bit of conspiracy minded thinking. Hollywood is not a hivemind and other producers are not going to blacklist her out of solidarity with Whedon. No one has talked about Tractenberg for years…she hasn’t worked in 4 years, and the last few were just voice acting. This is the most publicity she’s gotten in a long, long time.
If she’s getting shunned from projects it’s more likely its because she’s making vague accusatory statements on Twitter, not because she had issues with Whedon.
It’s also possible that her career tailed off for reasons that had nothing to do with Whedon’s influence (or being blackballed due to it); she was a child actor, and it’s not uncommon at all for successful child actors to be unable to continue that success in their careers as adult actors.
I don’t know much about her, or what she’s up to outside of acting now; her IMDB and Wikipedia entries are both very sparse in that regard (the “Personal LIfe” section of her Wikipedia entry is completely empty). It may be that she grew sick of, or disenchanted with, acting (and her experiences with Whedon may or may not have played a role in that), it may be that she started a family and wants to spend more time with them, etc.
It wasn’t; the term wasn’t even well known then; the first use of the term was probably in the early 90s, and of course even today it’s not technically an official credit.
I think the first time I heard the term ‘showrunner’ would have been with David Chase who created The Sopranos. Or it might have been Matthew Weiner and ‘Mad Men’. It certainly wasn’t a common term in the 80’s and before.
Agreed. That she shifted into voice acting towards the end could signal a disinterest with being in front of a camera and on set.
I find the suggestion that she’s holding back now is a result of fear of professional repercussions implausible. She may have kept quiet as a 17 year old starlet for that reason, but now…there are probably other reasons.
Maybe she’s just a mediocre actress with no star appeal, and so can be replaced by thousands of similar actresses hungry for work and with no hint of scandal around them and who will work for less.
There are a million young actresses to can’t get work after they outgrow whatever characteristic got them noticed in the first place. I note that the Wikipedia page for her says her ‘rise to fame’ came after Buffy, and lasted for a few years before her career went downhill. That suggests to me that whatever happened to her career had little to do with Whedon’s behaviour,
It looks like her career hit a wall in 2011 or so, eight years after Buffy. The last entry for that section says she was on the cover of Maxim, then nothing after that except guest roles, voice work and an online show of some kind. Maybe that’s a clue.
The mostly likely reason for her decline, imo, is that she simply aged out. She was known as a child and teen actress mostly, and it’s common for young actors to lose their appeal when they grow up. It’s not just sex appeal. Donnie Most stopped being marketable the minute he stopped being a lovable redhead mop-top.
I think J Michael Straczynski was called a showrunner for Babylon 5.