Rebecca Hall Regrets Throwing Woody Allen Under the Bus

For all the good that the #MeToo movement brought in 2017, and beyond, some pretty disgusting and shameful McCarthyism was also unleashed in the process. People crumbling out of fear. Mass public shaming. Pointing the finger at innocent people.

One of the more blatant examples was Woody Allen getting thrown under the bus by an inordinate amount of his colleagues. The filmmaker wound up getting booted out of Hollywood and is now basically making films in Europe.

There were so many actors that came out and condemned Allen for allegations that were made against him more than four decades ago — reignited during #MeToo by his ex-wife Mia Farrow and her son, journalist Ronan Farrow. This list of cowardly personalities, all of which formerly worked with Allen, included Timothee Chalamet, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Colin Firth, Rachel Brosnahan, Kate Winslet and Mira Sorvino.

Rebecca Hall was another one, releasing a statement that she was “profoundly sorry” for working with the filmmaker on two of his films, and going as far as to donate her entire salary on Allen’s “Rainy Day in New York” to the #TimesUp organization.

The actress has now clearly had a 180 reversal and tells The Observer that she regrets throwing Allen under the bus, and that if she were to do it again, she would have kept her mouth shut:

I struggle with this one […] It’s very unlike me to make a public statement about anything […] I kind of regret making that statement, because I don’t think it’s the responsibility of his actors to speak to that situation.

I was in a tangle. Like, in this moment, it’s the most important thing to believe the women. Yes, of course, there’s going to be complications and nuances in these stories, but we’re redressing a balance here. So I felt like I wanted to do something definitive. But it just became, ‘another person denounces Woody Allen and regrets working with him’, which is not what I said actually. I don’t regret working with him. He gave me a great job opportunity and he was kind to me.

For all of the Gerwigs and Chalamets, there have been a handful of actors who are still standing by Allen, through thick and thin, and vehemently defend him to this very day, including Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, Diane Keaton, Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, and Larry David.

Back in 2020, Allen criticized the “self-serving’ actors who decided to point their fingers at him, derailing his career and turning him into a marked man in the industry:

The actors have no idea of the facts and they latch on to some self-serving, public, safe position. Who in the world is not against child molestation? That’s how actors and actresses are, and [denouncing me] became the fashionable thing to do, like everybody suddenly eating kale.

The allegations against Allen were vetted to the nth degree back in the ‘90s, and he was, more or less, exonerated by the courts and the media. Then Ronan Farrow, fresh off his landmark Harvey Weinstein NYT piece, decided to help out mama Mia, taking advantage of the hostile climate, and reigniting the Allen allegations, hoping, unlike in the ‘90s, that the savagely hungry media would bite this time around. That, they did.

I assume the actors mentioned who refuse to throw Allen under the bus might have read enough about the case to raise their own conspicuous doubts about it. If you are the kind of person who is open-minded and would rather be informed rather than just trust narratives, then by all means, read Robert Weide’s excellent dissections of Allen vs Farrow which were posted on 05.30.16, 12.13.17, and 01.14.18.