Julia Stiles ‘felt so slimy’ after Harvey Weinstein forced her to do dance scene in ‘Down to You’
Julia Stiles is no longer down for this rom-com.
The actress, 43, recently got candid about working with Harvey Weinstein on 2000’s “Down to You,” which also starred Freddie Prinze Jr., Shawn Hatosy, Selma Blair and Henry Winkler.
When Brett Goldstein asked Stiles on his “Films To Be Buried With” podcast what the worst movie she’s seen is, she responded, “One of my own movies, actually, that I think was executed very poorly.”
Stiles explained why she went with “Down to You.”
“It was a time when teen rom-coms were really popular, and the director wrote the script. He was a first-time director and he was a very, very intelligent, capable guy. The script was very good,” the star explained. “And then Harvey Weinstein got his hands on it.”
The film follows college students in New York City, Al (Prinze) and Imogen (Stiles) who meet at a bar and endure several trials and tribulations before they get their happily ever after.
In one scene, Imogen puts on Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” in her dorm and does a little dance around the room and across the pool table.
Stiles claimed the scene was added by Weinstein due to “the success of ‘Save the Last Dance,’ or the success of ’10 Things I Hate About You,’ with me dancing on the pool table. He needed to have me dancing in the film.”
She called Weinstein’s decision a “dumb” attempt to “capitalize on this trend.”
“I felt so slimy doing it the whole time,” confessed Stiles. “It was annoying. Because I was like, ‘Well, this is so cheap, and it’s not adding to the story.'”
This wasn’t the first time the actress discussed Weinstein, 72, coming onto the project after Kris Isacsson had already written the script.
“The movie changed a lot from the development process to the finished product,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “Kris Isacsson had a vision for it that was a lot darker, so I remember thinking it was really mature. Then Harvey Weinstein and Miramax ended up producing it and turned it into a movie that was much more of a commercial, upbeat romantic comedy, for better or worse.”
Weinstein is currently behind bars serving a 16-year prison sentence after his 2022 rape conviction in California.
The disgraced movie mogul was also convicted in New York in 2020 of criminal sexual assault and third-degree rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Weinstein will now have a retrial, starting April 15, after his conviction was overturned last spring.
