Dwayne Johnson can now be counted among the many who wish to identify the unnamed actor who “screamed” at Rebecca Ferguson while shooting a movie together.
Ferguson, who next appears in Dune: Part Two, recently detailed a disturbing behind-the-scenes experience with “an absolute idiot of a costar” that led her to stand up for herself on set. Her fellow cast member, for whom she did not provide pronouns, “was being so insecure and angry because this person couldn’t get the scenes out,” Ferguson said during the Reign With Josh Smith podcast. “And I think I was so vulnerable and uncomfortable that I got screamed at…and I would cry walking off set.”
Johnson, who costarred in 2014’s Hercules with Ferguson, wrote on X alongside a clip from the interview, “Hate seeing this but love seeing her stand up to bullshit.” He also took himself out of the running as a possible suspect. “Rebecca was my guardian angel sent from heaven on our set,” Johnson added. “I love that woman. I’d like to find out who did this.” (Elsewhere on the podcast, Ferguson said that she didn’t want to talk about Hercules because “we don’t need to promote directors like that,” in apparent reference to disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner.)
Ferguson said that the costar in question “would literally look at me in front of the whole crew and say, ‘You call yourself an actor? This is what I have to work with?’” She continued, “I stood there just breaking.… Because this person was number one on the call sheet, there was no safety net for me. No one had my back.”
Tensions ran so high, said Ferguson, that the next day she told the actor, “You get off my set.… You can F off. I’m gonna work towards a tennis ball. I never want to see you again.”
“And then I remember the producers came up and said, ‘You can’t do this to number one. We have to let this person be on set,’” she recalled. “And I said the person can turn around and I can act to the back of the head. And I did. I was so scared. I feel it now when I’m saying it.”
When Ferguson confronted the issue with her director, they ultimately came to her defense. “You’re right. I am not taking care of everyone else. I’m trying to fluff this person because it’s so unstable,” she remembered the filmmaker saying. “It was great from that moment, but it took so long for me to get to that,” Ferguson concluded.
While speculation about the actor’s identity has cropped up on social media, with users utilizing process of elimination to find the culprit, Ferguson ruled out at least two suspects during the interview: The Greatest Showman’s Hugh Jackman and Mission: Impossible’s Tom Cruise. “And the person is…” she teased, before pausing to laugh.
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