Rebel Wilson has made more claims regarding Sacha Baron Cohen’s treatment of her, saying in an interview to promote her new memoir, that he set out to humiliate her when they worked together.
Wilson’s forthcoming memoir Rebel Rising includes her claims that the British actor sexually harassed her on the set of their 2016 film Grimsby – allegations denied by Cohen and the film’s producers.
In an interview with The Times newspaper, Wilson does not refer to these claims. She says she felt “disrespected on set” but kept quiet for fear of being labelled a troublemaker.
She tells the paper she felt humiliated by the attention paid to her weight on screen:
“It’s one thing for someone who is fat to exploit their size for comedy, but it’s another for somebody else to humiliate you.”
And she adds that her costumes for the film were chosen to “see all the cellulite on my thighs and a top to show the fattest part of my arm… like I was something to be laughed at and degraded because of my size.”
When Wilson refused to run naked across a football pitch for a scene, she tells The Times that a stripper was hired instead, and she was asked to watch on a monitor.
When she later went back to film reshoots, Wilson tells the paper she felt ashamed of herself for returning. “The fact that I then went back… Why do I have such low self-worth?”
Baron Cohen has rejected Wilson’s claims about her experiences on the set of Grimsby. Friday saw a clip appear in the UK’s Daily Mail appearing to show that Wilson collaborated completely with the creative process, a clip that Wilson told the newspaper had been edited and presented out of context. She called it “an a**hole move” from Cohen and the producers of the film.
