Ruby Rose explains why she left Batwoman
October 22, 2021 10:52 AM   Subscribe

She allges that there were dangerous working conditions on the set. Other articles on this topic here and here. Rose discusses their neck injury and being pressured to come back to work, witnessing a crew member being burned, filing during Covid, watching someone's pants being steamed while wearing them(!), Dougray Scott's yelling at others, and the PA who was paralyzed due to an on-set injury.

Warner Brothers claims that Rose was fired from the show due to an internal investigation into complaints about Rose's workplace behavior and calls the allegations "revisionist history."

I'm pretty sure that investigative journalists/recreational investigators on the Internet would be able to corroborate a lot of these claims, so if you see any other links doing so, please post them here. So far I just know about the paralyzed situation.

This news came out a few days before the accidental shooting on the set of Rust story. Pajiba has an excellent article on various deaths on sets and how this shouldn't be happening.
posted by jenfullmoon (10 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Is there anyone who really finds it plausible that a work site wasn't a completely chaotic shit show from top to bottom. I'm consistently amazed that anything at all actually gets done in this country from what I've seen of how workplaces operate.
posted by bleep at 10:55 AM on October 22, 2021 [22 favorites]


Not to make a statement either one way or another, but in the interest of providing more links as requested in OP, one of the production assistants on set has refuted the claims and said she was a nightmare to work for:
We worked countless long days, always going into overtime because she was either late or not off book, or some other reason relating to her not wanting to be there. From the moment we started the show she made every new person that came on uneasy and unsupported. She was a horrible star and made so many of us feel like we were helping make a show for a dictator.

Filmmakers, no matter what position they are on a film set deserve to be treated with respect. That’s how I was taught growing up and in film school, and when I read her article claiming that the production was at fault, it infuriated me because having been there, I don’t wanna stand by and let her badmouth a company that she tried to screw over. No matter how bad your day, you have no right to be cruel. And season 1 was her reign of cruelty.
Personally I think two things can simultaneously be true: that she (and others) were certainly injured and treated badly, and also that she wasn't great to work with and might have been fired for those reasons.

Really at the end of everything, it's yet more evidence that the CW/WB are terrible employers, are actively endangering their casts and crews, and are prepared to litigate and pretend otherwise. I hope the unions take them to the cleaners.
posted by fight or flight at 11:34 AM on October 22, 2021 [20 favorites]


Personally I think two things can simultaneously be true: that she (and others) were certainly injured and treated badly, and also that she wasn't great to work with and might have been fired for those reasons.

Yep, that sounds about right. Thanks for the link. I did read this whole thing thinking "at least some of that can probably be corroborated by other people, right? Especially with severe injuries?" (I don't know if we can get the Truth of The Pants, though :P) I mean, if injuries were that bad, that's harder to cover up than people being douches on the set.

Dougray Scott is refuting it, btw.

posted by jenfullmoon at 11:46 AM on October 22, 2021




FWIW, film industry working conditions tend to be horrible. They were close to having a massive strike up until a few days ago. I don't know anything about the specific details of this case, but what she's describing sounds pretty systemic for the industry.
posted by clawsoon at 12:09 PM on October 22, 2021 [2 favorites]


The actor said she was required to return to work 10 days after her surgery, with Roth telling her the crew would lose their jobs and it would cost the studio millions if she did not promptly return.

They guilted her into cutting short her recovery process, failed to address safety issues which led to two more significant injuries (who knows how many minor ones went unreported), and then complained she had an attitude problem and wasn't a team player.
posted by meowzilla at 12:11 PM on October 22, 2021 [13 favorites]


It is a grueling industry. I spent a year working in film and TV production after film school, and had to quit when I got an injury requiring surgery. But I was just about done with it at that point already, due to being demoralized and broke.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 1:20 PM on October 22, 2021 [1 favorite]


re·fute
/rəˈfyo͞ot/

prove that (someone) is wrong.
"his voice challenging his audience to rise and refute him"

deny or contradict (a statement or accusation).
"a spokesman totally refuted the allegation of bias"
posted by ActingTheGoat at 3:13 PM on October 22, 2021 [4 favorites]


The Autostraddle link (second one above) also goes on to say this:
As I was reading Rose’s IG, I was thinking about [Azie Tesfai Instagram live 21/09/21 w/ Anna Diop, Javicia Leslie & Candice Patton], where she got together to talk with Javicia Leslie (our Batwoman) and Candice Patton (Iris West from The Flash) to talk about being Black women in the Arrowverse, and how they’ve had to form their own support group to deal with racism from the top down while filming and promoting their shows. Javicia Leslie mentioned, more than once, for example, that DC’s decision to keep Kate Kane alive was a nightmare for her because it opened up even more doors for racist attacks from fans who wanted Kane back in the cape and cowl, or from shippers who wanted to see Sophie back with Kate instead of growing closer to Ryan Wilder. She can’t even turn on the comments during her IG Lives, due to the blatantly racist remarks.
I'm in the "both sides could be at fault" school, and think that serious, life-changing injuries are maybe a bit more important than tardiness and rudeness.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:43 AM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]




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