The 38-year-old actress opens up about getting Fox to remove a scene from the film that featured a registered sex offender.
Olivia Munn is opening up about the controversy surrounding her latest film, The Predator.
The 38-year-old actress successfully lobbied 20th Century Fox to cut a scene in the sci-fi thriller earlier this month that featured actor Steven Wilder Striegel, director Shane Blake's longtime friend who Munn discovered is a registered sex offender, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Munn was a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres on Tuesday, where she spoke candidly about the situation, and discussed why she initially felt isolated by her co-stars after coming forward with the information on Striegel.
"The public, social media, fans, strangers on the street, all of the news outlets have been extremely supportive and that's such a gift because it's not an easy situation to be in," she explained. "I did reach out to my co-stars individually and said, 'Hey, I want you guys to know I found this out.' And I found it out through an acquaintance who wanted to know if I knew, and I didn't know them well enough to know if they would say something or not but I figured, in that moment, they weren't calling me just to kinda give me the heads up. It was going to be something that would get out there."
Munn continued on, telling host Ellen DeGeneres that she wanted to give her co-stars the heads up so that they "wouldn't be blindsided."
"When I did call my co-stars, I got chastised the next day by people in the studio for telling them, and [they asked] why am I just not keeping it quiet, 'It got deleted, what's the big deal?'" she claimed. "Well, it happened, and when we do movies, we have this reach. It goes everywhere. There's people all over the world that see what we do. And just that tiny drop of fame can be used to hurt an impressionable person and that's just not OK."
"I had no idea how bad details of the case were and what happened to that girl until it came out in The Los Angeles Times," she added. "The reality is, the people who collude to keep people like this in positions of power, that's the real problem. The people who keep turning blind eyes."
Munn also said that the lack of support she received from her co-stars at the time was just as disheartening.
"My castmembers, nobody said anything to me about it," she claimed. "Nobody talked to me, nobody reached out that whole day. At first, I thought, 'Maybe it's because they just don't know what to say.' But privately I did feel iced out. I think that's what's really important for people to understand. When you see something, you have to say something. However, it's not going to be easy and there will be people that just get mad at you for not playing the game."
"I think people expected me to be quiet because it was my movie," she continued. "But the truth is, I don't care. I don't care if this movie gave me all the money in the world and all the power. Like, if it cost one person's life, they can take it. I don't want this career."
The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that Striegel, 49, pleaded guilty in 2010 to attempting to lure a 14-year-old female into a sexual relationship via the internet. Fox removed him from the film, according to the outlet, after Munn reported the information to the studio on Aug. 15.
"Our studio was not aware of Mr. Striegel's background when he was hired," a Fox spokesperson said in a statement to The Times. "We were not aware of his background during the casting process due to legal limitations that impede studios from running background checks on actors."
Shortly after Fox made their decision to cut Striegel from the movie, Munn was honored at the Creative Coalition’s Spotlight Awards Dinner at the House of Aurora in Toronto, Canada. When accepting the award, she tearfully discussed the lack of support she received from her co-stars.
"[Striegel's firing] came out on Thursday and the interesting thing is not one of my cast members reached out to me to say, 'Are you OK?'’ or 'Thanks' or anything," she said at the time. "At the premiere that night I look over and the other five cast members are giving the director [Shane Black] a standing ovation, but they didn’t even give me a call that day."
Following Munn's speech, Sterling K. Brown and Boyd Holbrook offered their support to their co-star via social media. More on that here.
The Predator hits theaters Friday. Hear more on the film in the video below.
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