Thandie Newton says Time's Up didn't want her to participate

The character remains cloaked in mystery ahead of the film’s release next month.

Thandie Newton has tirelessly spoken out against sexual harassment and abuse within the film industry but apparently, that wasn’t enough for Time’s Up.

The movement was set up in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, by female Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman and Jessica Chastain. Newton claims that she was left out because she wasn’t as famous as them.

“I wasn’t hot enough,” she told Australia’s Daily Telegraph (via Vulture). “I wasn’t mainstream enough and I wasn’t going to be at the Oscars this year, even though I am having a renaissance in my career.”

Newton returns in the critically-acclaimed HBO series Westworld for season two and her performance has been particularly praised by viewers and critics alike. The British actress told the newspaper that she found it “very painful” that she was not asked to participate because she had been “ostracised” for speaking out about being assaulted by a casting director.

She spoke about the harassment in W magazine, in 2016, when actresses weren’t so easily supported with their #MeToo stories.

“He had a camera shooting up my skirt”, she said, “and asked me to touch my tits and think about the guy making love to me in the scene. I thought, ‘OK, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it.”

Time’s Up was launched on January 1 2018 as a legal defence fund for victims of sexual harassment in the workplace. It has raised over $20 million, and gathered over 200 volunteer lawyers.

Newton has also followed Evan Rachel Woods in discussing the fact that she will also be getting equal pay to her male co-stars for the third season of Westworld.

“They’re all happening right now, and yeah, we’re all equal across the board,” Newton told Vanity Fair. “It’s really exciting. It’s unprecedented. It’s — goodness; it shatters so much calcified pain, resentment, frustration. It just shatters it.”

HBO executive Casey Bloy said that the gender pay parity was spurred on by the Time’s Up movement.

“We just finished our process where we went through and made sure that there were no inappropriate disparities in pay,” Boys explained, “and where there were, if we found any, we corrected it going forward.”

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