True Detective director and executive producer Cary Joji Fukunaga has been accused of firing actress Raeden Greer after she refused to go topless for a scene on the show.
Greer, who has appeared in the likes of American Horror Story: Coven and The Host, told Daily Beast that she was hired to play an exotic dancer in the first season of True Detective.
The actress claims that she was assured by both her agent and the casting department that the role would not involve nudity because it wasn’t disclosed in her contract.
“I kept getting the answer from my agent and from casting – ‘no, that would be absolutely unheard of if they asked you to do nudity after it wasn’t disclosed,” she said.
“There was no rider, there was no negotiating this into your contract, that would not happen, so stop asking about it because it’s making you look amateurish.’ So, I was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna quit worrying about it’.”
Though when she arrived on set, Greer found nothing in her trailer but a set of pasties and a nude thong.
The actress claims that after objecting to the outfit, Fukunaga and another producer on the show puller her aside and attempted to convince her to strip for the scene.
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“Cary said to me at that moment, ‘Everybody on this show goes topless. All the women on the show go topless. Your character is a stripper, so you have to,’” Greer said.
“He was trying different things to convince me that it’s not a big deal,” she added. “It [was] going to be very tasteful, or it’s just gonna be really insignificant in the background. I was like, ‘Well, if it’s so insignificant, why is he so insistent that I have to do this?’ It was just on and on and on with no budging.”
Greer claims that she was then fired from the role after refusing to compromise, and Fukunaga replaced her role with a background artist on set, an experience she describes as “humiliating.”
“It was degrading. It was humiliating and made me feel terrible,” she said. “As soon as I got in my car, I started crying and I called my agent and I told her what happened and she couldn’t believe it.”
Greer says she felt compelled to speak out about her experience after reading an interview Fukunaga gave in promotion for the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Fukunaga noted that he enlisted the help of Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge to help bring a feminist perspective to the script.
“From my very first conversations with [producer Barbara Broccoli], that was a very strong drive,” Fukunaga said. “You can’t change Bond overnight into a different person. But you can definitely change the world around him and the way he has to function in that world.
“It’s a story about a white man as a spy in this world, but you have to be willing to lean in and do the work to make the female characters more than just contrivances.”
