Cast members from Clint Eastwood’s new film “Richard Jewell” have responded to the backlash surrounding the film’s portrayal of a former Atlanta journalist, Fox News reports.
The setup: The backlash over the upcoming film, “Richard Jewell,” centers around how the film portrays Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), the journalist at the center of the media coverage of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing, Deseret News reported.
- The movie portrays Scruggs sleeping with a source to obtain information.
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where Scruggs worked at the time, said there was no evidence of that happening.
- The AJC sent a letter to Warner Bros. that asked for a disclaimer on the film.
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Response: Now, cast members and crew from the film have spoken out on the backlash (via 11 Alive).
- Clint Eastwood: “There’s only so much research you can do. You can’t live inside the people because they no longer exist. We know as much as anybody knows. Kathy Scruggs was a very interesting personality, and she did find the answer to it, so how she did it, nobody will ever really know. It could have certainly happened this way.”
- Jon Hamm: “It’s my understanding that the people making these accusations haven’t seen the film yet. ”I kind of feel like the irony in that is sort of ridiculous. Kathy is portrayed by Olivia in this film as she was, which is an incredibly nuanced individual. To reduce her to this one thing is not fair.”
- Hamm: “I think that there were certainly suggestions of impropriety with her character, but there are also some suggestions of impropriety with the character that I play, and that’s part of the tragedy of this story.”
- Paul Walter Hauser: “I think the feeling is that (this movie) sort of came out of nowhere. This project has been around for about 5 years. It was a very famous screenplay. It had Leo (Leonardo DeCaprio) attached to it at some point.”