Hollywood actors such as Chris Evans and Jessica Chastain have spoken out about a recently resurfaced interview in which director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted that actress Maria Schneider wasn’t aware of the rape scene in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris before the day of shooting.
In a recently resurfaced video interview from 2013, Bertolucci confirmed that Schneider, who died in 2011, did not know about the rape scene, and that the graphic nature of the scene was improvised on set.
Celebrities voiced their disgust of the resurfaced news on Twitter.
Chastain said of the revelations: “The director planned her attack. I feel sick.” Evans tweeted that Bertolucci and Marlon Brando “should be in jail”. Ava DuVernay wrote: “As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it.”
Actress Anna Kendrick acknowledged that Schneider’s lack of knowledge of the scene before shooting day was nothing new.
Schneider said in a 2007 interview: “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that.”
She continued: “Marlon said to me, ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie’, but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol — I wanted to be recognised as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown.”
Schneider added: “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”
The actress claims that the late Brando also felt taken advantage of by Bertolucci, so it was easy to imagine how the experience affected the young actress. “Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48,” she said. “And he was Marlon Brando!”
Last Tango in Paris was critically lauded but surrounded in public controversy. Bertolucci was put on trial for obscenity in Italy after the release of the film. Copies of the film were destroyed at the time and Bertolucci was served with a four-month suspended prison sentence and denied his civil rights (including voting) for five years.
