Joss Whedon finally addresses the many misconduct allegations that have been leveled against him by Justice League stars Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher, as well as the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In a new Vulture profile, the superstar showrunner admits he had affairs with various Buffy employees while the show was on the air and says he feels “damn terrible in them”, mainly because “it ruins the power dynamics”.
However, Whedon insists that he felt he “had” to sleep with the women working for him and was “powerless” to resist.
“I’m not really kidding,” Whedon insisted, saying that he was surrounded by women who would have ignored him when he was younger and feared that if he hadn’t had sex with them, he would “always regret about it”.
Whedon also denied Gadot’s claim that he threatened to ruin her career during an argument on the set of Justice League, stating that she did not understand his “flowery” way of speaking.
“I don’t threaten people. Who does that?” Whedon said. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flamboyant in my speech.”
In Whedon’s version, they argued over a scene that Gadot wanted to cut. Whedon said he joked that if she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to tie him to the railroad tracks and do it over his dead body.
“Then they told me that I was saying something about her dead body and the bondage her to the railroad,” he said.
Gadot’s response: “I understand perfectly,” she said to the Vulture through email.
Actor Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in the 2017 film, also accused Whedon of cutting back on the character’s presence and making choices that he felt “would be offensive to the black community”.
He also accused Whedon of changing the actor’s complexion to lighten the skin tone.
Whedon told Vulture that he gave the entire film a lighter look in pre-production, including the skin tones of all the characters.
He insists that the only reason Fisher’s role was cut from his version of the film was becauseThe storyline “logically made no sense” and he felt that the acting was poor.
Whedon said that none of Fisher’s claims were “neither true nor worth discussing” and suggested that there was some sort of conspiracy to get his hands on him.
“We’re talking about a malevolent force,” he said. “We’re talking about a bad actor in both senses.”
Fisher commented indirectly on Whedon in his Twitter post, but suggested there were more important issues.
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