Minnie Driver. Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Minnie Driver is opening up about the conditions on set while filming 1998’s Hard Rain.
Driver, 54, claimed she wasn’t allowed to wear a wetsuit under her costume, despite there being “20 million gallons of water.”
“It was set during this massive rain storm. There were huge rain machines. We shot crazy hours,” Driver recalled on a Tuesday, April 2, episode of the “I Weigh With Jameela Jamil” podcast. “It was tough, like, it was a tough movie, but everybody else could wear a wetsuit underneath their costume.”
She continued: “And I was told by the producers that I couldn’t because they wanted to see my nipples, and that there was no point in having the wet T-shirt if you couldn’t have what was underneath it.”
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After calling her agent, Driver claimed that other actors “wouldn’t speak to [her] on the set.”
“I was so punished for it,” she said. “It was leaked to the press that I called and complained about conditions, but it was as if there was nothing to complain about and I was just complaining.”
She continued, “So, eventually, you do turn on yourself. You do go, ‘It was my fault for saying anything, you stupid big mouth. You should have shut up.’ And that goes in and then alters the way in which you kind of see yourself and your natural inclination to put your hand up and go, ‘This isn’t right. This is dangerous and this is out of balance,’ that you’ll be punished for that stops you having a kind of balanced way of approaching your life because you’ve been systemically told that it’s wrong.”
The movie shot for seven months and was centered around a planned heist to rob banks during a major rainstorm in India, starring actors like Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater and Randy Quaid.
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This isn’t the first time that Driver has discussed filming Hard Rain. She recalled arguing for better conditions on the set during a 2022 interview with The Times.
“That followed me for a really long time, that whole idea of me being difficult,” she said at the time. “If you stood up and said, ‘This is unacceptable,’ which I routinely did, you were vilified.”
She noted that she “will always be a champion on set,” saying, “I’d be like a lioness about anything that was happening, to a male or female. If you see that somebody is mistreating somebody else, you have to say something. You will almost certainly be punished for it on some level, but I don’t think that is a reason not to speak up.”
