fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2577 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2577 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald-Crane, from the soap opera Passions]

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03.

[BBC Sherlock]

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04.

[Nobunaga the Fool]

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05.

[Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from Star Wars]

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06.

[The Quick and the Dead]

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07.

[Nathan Fillion]

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08.

[Warehouse 13]

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10.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 030 secrets from Secret Submission Post #368.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You didn't even mention the only good reason I've heard people call him Not A Feminist, which is that he had an actress on one of his shows fired because she got pregnant.

Fuck me, seriously???!!!

Jesus fucking Christ.

Which actress?

Charisma Carpenter.

And? That's a legitimate reason to fire an actress.

Imagine you hire a woman for a long-running TV series and she gets pregnant. Well shit, now what? You can either hastily write in a pregnancy subplot, a la Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or give the actress less screen time and/or cover her belly with long shirts or props, like How I Met Your Mother.

Neither option is a good one and both interfere with the job they were hired to do. Why shouldn't she be fired? In fact, in this case, didn't the actress purposefully hide her pregnancy?

No, she didn't. Iirc, Joss told her that he woukdnt fire after she told him that she was pregnant andfired her anyway. He was a complete asshole about it either way.

I thought there was more to it than that - like there'd been ongoing issues? I remember hearing that she'd also cut or colored her hair without permission, which sounds really trivial, but when you're contracted to play a character with a specific look, maybe it's not so cool?

I don't know, I was in fandom at the time, and just remember hearing generalized gossip about the actors before she got fired. I kind of presumed there was more to it than ~just~ the pregnancy.

Bad optics, though, I'll give you that/

They wrote in a non-pregnancy character plot and a temporary replacement for a main actress who got pregnant on the show Leverage, so there'd be an excuse to keep her mostly off camera for the second season. She returned to perform the same main role just fine for three more seasons after that. I didn't even know she was pregnant at all until I looked it up later. So, I feel like we're kinda past the point where pregnancy - or anything else that might happen to an actor's body that affects their role, such as breaking a limb - is some kind of Defcon One disaster worthy of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Also, I imagine if Carpenter hid her pregnancy at all, it was because she knew how Whedon would react. When you're known to be unreasonable about things, people don't tell you about those things when they happen - funny, that.

Edited (Edited my assumption about Carpenter, I don't know either way) 2014-01-23 02:27 (UTC)

Here's a video where Charisma talks about getting fired from Angel. Thought you might be interested in it.

http://jamesjupiter.tumblr.com/post/1036099581/charisma-carpenter-talks-about-getting-fired-from

Thank you so much! I've never seen that before, that was awesome. Wow, Whedon gave Carpenter the shaft in more ways than one, but I'm glad she pulled through for the fans, because her final appearance made up for so much, if not everything. And it's a great example of how being a great writer, which he is, doesn't automatically make Whedon the best person, in this particularly incident, at least.

You're quite welcome! It was awesome that she was able to pull through for her fans, but I'm forever going to be miffed at Whedon for shafting her in the first place. Dude was a conplete ass.

Being female, feminist and an aspiring television producer I would at the very least take an actress off my show from the moment she gave birth until she is ready* to get back into acting, if she got pregnant. Because even if you can in theory hide it or rewrite the story to fit it, it does not always fit into the story and then it might just be easier and/or better to get rid of that character either for a while or permanently.

*Be it two weeks after giving birth or when the baby is older.

I can't believe that's still fucking legal in the US.

In Canada it's illegal to fire someone over a pregnancy and she could have sued him for everything he was worth.

...Then again, we also have national maternity leave, so go figure.

Acting might be an exception?

I know a whole swathe of the standard discrimination and child labour laws don't apply over here

[ SECRET POST #2577 ]

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