‘I’m one of the nicer showrunners’: Joss Whedon denies misconduct allegations

Thread: ‘I’m one of the nicer showrunners’: Joss Whedon denies misconduct allegations
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Grisham

Ensuring Transparency
Joss Whedon, Buffy creator and director of films including The Avengers and Justice League, has responded to multiple allegations of misconduct, denying claims from actors including Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher that he threatened and belittled them on set.

In a lengthy interview with New York magazine, Whedon responded to the stream of allegations made against him, which began to gain momentum in 2020 when Fisher detailed his experiences on the set of Justice League. Whedon stepped in to direct the film after the departure of Zack Snyder.

Fisher described Whedon as "gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable" and claimed his behaviour was "enabled" by senior executives at Warner Brothers studio. He said he had been told by a source that Whedon had lightened his skin tone in the 2017 film, and criticised Whedon for cutting several actors of colour from the film in rewrites, including reducing his role as Cyborg. When he shared his feedback, Whedon told him: "It feels like I'm taking notes right now, and I don't like taking notes from anybody – not even Robert Downey Jr."
Whedon denied Fisher's account at the time, but gave no further statement. But speaking to New York magazine, Whedon said he had brightened the entire film in postproduction, not just Fisher's skin tone, and that he had cut down Cyborg's role because he felt Fisher was a bad actor. He claimed viewers at test screenings had reported that Cyborg was "the worst of all the characters in the film".

"We're talking about a malevolent force," Whedon said of Fisher in the interview. "We're talking about a bad actor in both senses."

Fisher did not respond to New York's request for comment, but wrote on Twitter: "Looks like Joss Whedon got to direct an endgame after all … Rather than address all of the lies and buffoonery today — I will be celebrating the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tomorrow the work continues."
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Gadot, who plays Wonder Woman in Justice League, had also claimed Whedon "threatened" her on set and said he would make her "career miserable" during disagreements. A witness told Hollywood Reporter: "Joss was bragging that he's had it out with Gal. He told her he's the writer and she's going to shut up and say the lines and he can make her look incredibly stupid in this movie."

Whedon denied he had threatened Gadot to New York magazine, saying she had misunderstood him when he said she would have to tie him to a railroad track before he'd cut a scene she had requested he take out.

"I don't threaten people. Who does that? English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech," Whedon said. In response, Gadot told New York: "I understood perfectly."
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Whedon denied to New York he had ever called Carpenter fat, but admitted he "was not mannerly" to her, saying: "Most of my experiences with Charisma were delightful and charming. She struggled sometimes with her lines, but nobody could hit a punch line harder than her." Of the Buffy set, he said: "I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party."

Whedon also spoke about his affairs, which were first revealed in 2017 by his ex-wife, Kai Cole. Then, she called Whedon, famed for creating the feminist icon Buffy, a "hypocrite preaching feminist ideals" in an open letter to his fans about his behaviour towards women.

On the matter of sleeping with multiple employees, journalists and fans while married, Whedon said he felt "fucking terrible about them", but felt he "had" to have sexual relationships with women, especially beautiful and young women who he felt would have ignored him before he became famous, because he would "always regret it" if he hadn't.

He admitted he could be difficult to work with, but lamented that people had used "every weaponisable word of the modern era to make it seem like I was an abusive monster. I think I'm one of the nicer showrunners that's ever been."
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www.theguardian.com

‘I’m one of the nicer showrunners’: Joss Whedon denies misconduct allegations

Whedon denies allegations of threats and cruelty detailed by Buffy and Justice League actors, saying he has been made to seem like an ‘abusive monster’
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
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DESTROYA said:
When people have to say they are nice usually means they are not , his actions speak for themselves
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I mean, the guy's been dunked on by a lot of people he's previously worked with. The Buffy cast in particular. If it was only Ray Fisher (Cyborg) who was bitching, I wouldn't have taken it seriously. But the fact that Gal Gadot and others have spoken up over Whedon's shitty and hypocritical behavior leads me believe there is some truth to all this.

About the only people who haven't thrown him under the bus are the cast of The Avengers. And I suspect they're keeping quiet due to orders from the Mouse.
 
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Jesus Christ. I read the whole story at Vulture, and Whedon really comes across as a sexist asshole portraying himself as a victim.

www.vulture.com

The Undoing of Joss Whedon

The Buffy creator, once an icon of Hollywood feminism, is now an outcast accused of misogyny. How did he get here?
www.vulture.com www.vulture.com

He admired strong women like his mother, yet he'd discovered he was capable of hurting them, "usually by sleeping with them and ghosting or whatever." He would later tell his biographer this duality gave him "an advantage" over the girls in his college class on feminism when it came to discussing relations between the sexes. "I have seen the enemy," he said, "and he's in my brain!"
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After Wesleyan, Whedon moved to L.A., where he met Cole and wrote the screenplay for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 1992 film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui. He wanted to tell a story about someone who turns out to be important despite the fact that no one takes that person seriously. "It took me a long time to realize I was writing about me," he told me, "and that my feeling of powerlessness and constant anxiety was at the heart of everything." His avatar was not a fearful young man, however, but a gorgeous girl with extraordinary courage. He wanted to be her, and he wanted to fuck her.
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Whedon acknowledged he was not as "civilized" back then. "I was young," he said. "I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party." He said he would never intentionally humiliate anyone. "If I am upsetting somebody, it will be a problem for me." The costume designer who said he'd grabbed her arm? "I don't believe that," he said, shaking his head. "I know I would get angry, but I was never physical with people." Had he made out with an actress on the floor of someone's office? "That seems false. I don't understand that story even a little bit." He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. "I should run to the loo." When he came back, he said the story didn't make sense to him because he "lived in terror" of his affairs being discovered.
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On our second day of interviews, I asked Whedon about his affairs on the set of Buffy. He looked worse than he had the day before. His eyes were faintly bloodshot. He hadn't slept well. "I feel fucking terrible about them," he said. When I pressed him on why, he noted "it messes up the power dynamic," but he didn't expand on that thought. Instead, he quickly added that he had felt he "had" to sleep with them, that he was "powerless" to resist. I laughed. "I'm not actually joking," he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn't have sex with them, he would "always regret it." Looking back, he feels shame and "horror," he said. I thought of something he had told me earlier. A vampire, he'd said, is the "exalted outsider," a creature that feels like "less than everybody else and also kind of more than everybody else. There's this insecurity and arrogance. They do a little dance."
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In our conversations, Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. "I don't know who started it," he told me. "I just know in whose name it was done." Snyder superfans were attacking him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. "They don't give a fuck about feminism," he said. "I was made a target by my ex-wife, and people exploited that cynically." As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. "She put out a letter saying some bad things I'd done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and so people knew I was gettable."
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Stouffers said:
Are you suggesting that people are human beings?!
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This whole thing blew up because Joss Whedon was treated like some god of the geeksphere rather than the human figure he is. Shit, the Vulture article opens describing an event at the University of East Anglia where professors of English were sucking his proverbial dick about how he was a force for change with regards to gender stereotypes:

In the fall of 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group — theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors — and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers ("Buffy the Backside Slayer"). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy's enemy and, later, her lover.

If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show's creator, Joss Whedon, the "avatar" of a new religion, the "founder of a new faith." Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship. As Lavery would write in the introduction to a book he co-authored on the series, Whedon had not simply composed a narrative about a struggle against the "forces of darkness — vampires, demons, monsters of all varieties"; he had taken a stand against a panoply of oppressive "social forces," most obviously the "forces of gender stereotyping." According to the prevailing rules of Hollywood horror at the time, Whedon's protagonist, a hot blonde with a dumb name, should have died within the opening scenes, but Whedon had flipped the genre on its head, endowing her with superhuman powers and a hero's journey.
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Like shit, since when did George Lucas and Steven Spielberg receive this kind of adulation? There's also the fact that Whedon used the early days of the internet to build up his legend as mentioned in the article.
 
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I don't know about the different allegations, but what I can say is that Joss Whedon is a piece of shit and terribly overrated.
 
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King of Foxes said:
I mean I'm sure he is but let's not forget that pieces of shit and people willing to literally fuck for a role are the rule and not the exception in Hollywood.

Same as political figures, majority are dirty
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This is pretty much my opinion. Actors and media personalities are generally a bunch of wankers, perverts and amoral borderline sociopaths.

Whedon is a cunt, sure, but he's only really different in comparison to most of his peers in regards to his success.
 
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Stilton Disco said:
This is pretty much my opinion. Actors and media personalities are generally a bunch of wankers, perverts and amoral borderline sociopaths.

Whedon is a cunt, sure, but he's only really different in comparison to most of his peers in regards to his success.
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It's certainly easier to spot which celebrities are cunts now with the advent of social media. And the combination of Brexit and Trump becoming president in 2016 really brought out the liberal bias most of these celebrities have and how they really don't give a shit for the common man.

The celebrities I do have some respect for now are those who don't parrot the SJW talking points. Robert Downey Jr. for one, who's a Republican and by all accounts a stand up guy. Dave Chappelle, while definitely embracing the whole BLM lie, gets a thumbs up from me for openly mocking transgender people and their supporters. JK Rowling too I appreciate for pushing back on the insanity of transgenders invading women spaces.

Oh, and who can forget Keanu Reeves? Guy's still awesome in my book.

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Stifler's Mom said:
The only thing I ever liked made by him was Firefly.

No idea why anyone likes any of his other work.
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I have to agree. I watched some episodes of Firefly and that of Buffy. It was 'okay' for me, but I don't get why Whedon got such a fanatical following for creating such run of the mill genre entertainment. He's no Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas.
 
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As someone who adores Buffy and Angel - my faborite shows ever tbh - and really enjoyed both Firefly, and Dollhouse...

I don't think I'd be very much interested in a new Whedon series

Not because of the allegations, but because his time sorta came and went. Like boohoo he's a mean boss. Who gives a shit.

Idk he was supposed to have that Nevers show and I couldn't bring myself to watch an episode

His movies apart from Serenity are lame. Don't care about Avengers, Dr Horrible was... horrible, and his Much Ado About Nothing adaptation was one I forgot the second I walked out of the theater

What else was there, Agents of Shield?

Please. He's a mixed bag and then some tbh
 
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GreyHorace said:
It's certainly easier to spot which celebrities are cunts now with the advent of social media. And the combination of Brexit and Trump becoming president in 2016 really brought out the liberal bias most of these celebrities have and how they really don't give a shit for the common man.

The celebrities I do have some respect for now are those who don't parrot the SJW talking points. Robert Downey Jr. for one, who's a Republican and by all accounts a stand up guy. Dave Chappelle, while definitely embracing the whole BLM lie, gets a thumbs up from me for openly mocking transgender people and their supporters. JK Rowling too I appreciate for pushing back on the insanity of transgenders invading women spaces.

Oh, and who can forget Keanu Reeves? Guy's still awesome in my book.

1200px-Reuni%C3%A3o_com_o_ator_norte-americano_Keanu_Reeves_%2846806576944%29_%28cropped%29.jpg



I have to agree. I watched some episodes of Firefly and that of Buffy. It was 'okay' for me, but I don't get why Whedon got such a fanatical following for creating such run of the mill genre entertainment. He's no Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas.
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> shits on Whedon
> Keanu is so heckin' wholesome!!!

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Joss Whedon is fast becoming my new fav sociopath after his comments about Gadot and Ray Fisher.

The guy is a complete cunt but he's good for a laugh.
 
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teezzy said:
What else was there, Agents of Shield?
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I gotta say, I fuckin love Agents of SHIELD, it's my favorite thing in that whole MCU. Season one's weak, so I mean, I understand why anyone would be hesitant to believe this, I thought S1 was trash. S2's better but still nothing great, it's just where some of the new characters start to become likable. S3's where the show comes into its own, and S4 is where it surpasses the rest of the franchise, with S5 riding that high all the way through S7. I'm pretty sure Joss was only involved in developing the series, directing the pilot, and providing some guidance for S1. The show really belonged to his brother, Jed Whedon, and Jed's wife Maurissa Tancharoen.

I liked Firefly.
 
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