Mira Sorvino believes she was sexually harassed at the age of 16 by a casting director who gagged her with a condom during an audition for a horror movie role.
Mira Sorvino
The 50-year-old actress has become one of the most prominent faces of the #MeToo movement when she revealed she was sexually harassed by disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Now, Mira has opened up about the "inappropriate" treatment she experienced at her very first Hollywood audition at the hands of the unnamed man.
In an interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's 'HFPA In Conversation' podcast, she revealed: "In looking back over at my career, I realised that one of my very first auditions when I was 16, I was completely treated inappropriately by the casting director.
"In order to scare me for this horror movie scene, he tied me to a chair, he bruised my arm, and I was 16 years old, and then he gagged me, and I was all game because I'm trying to be scared for the scene.
"And at the end he takes the gag out of my mouth and he said, 'Sorry for the prophylactic,' so he had gagged me with a condom. I was too young to even know, thank God, what a condom tasted like.
"It was so inappropriate, and what the heck was a casting director doing with a condom in his pocket in an audition?"
The 'Mighty Aphrodite' star admits her naivety about the nature of the movie industry meant that, at the time, although she felt uncomfortable with what had happened she didn't question the man's behaviour.
She said: "When you're young, you're like, 'Oh OK, I've got to be tough, I've got to be down to really perform, and if that means they need me to go this extra mile' - and you see many times we have awards given to people for giving particularly raw performances in very brutal, sexual scenes or things like that."
Now, after three decades in the business, the Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner knows that some men "take advantage" of certain plots and storylines to get sexual gratification.
She said: "People take advantage of that. People have always taken advantage of that ... Like nude scene days or love scene days - all of a sudden contracts being thrown out the window. Directors pressuring you to have relationships with them, people casting you saying if you have a sexual relationship with them they'll give you the part."
Tagged in Harvey Weinstein