Avengers director Joss Whedon finally spoke about what went down during Justice League reshoots and all the accusations thrown at him since 2020 about toxic behavior – some of them serious – but, in a somewhat unsurprising twist, Whedon is trying to turn things around on the cast.
Discussing his time on the blockbuster superhero flick with Vulture, Whedon said they were rude to him and he never met “a ruder group of people” while also denying Gal Gadot’s accusations that he threatened her career.
Whedon would claim it was a “misunderstanding” caused by English being the Israeli actress’s second language and his own “flowery” verbiage despite Gadot’s fluency in English and other tongues. “I don’t threaten people. Who does that?” Whedon said. “English is not her first language, and I tend to be annoyingly flowery in my speech.”
He added she misinterpreted a snarky comment about tying him to a railroad track and changing a scene over his dead body when reports say the opposite. “Then I was told that I had said something about her dead body and tying her to the railroad track,” Whedon said.
When New York Magazine reached out, Gadot responded that she “understood perfectly.” An unnamed actress who worked on the Buffy spinoff Angel came forward to NY Mag as well to back up Gadot and contradict Whedon’s denial of threatening people or careers.
“Wow, he’s still using that line,” the unknown actress said while sharing a story of Whedon calling her at home to tell her she was “never going to work for him, or 20th Century Fox again” after her manager tried to get her a raise.
Between the tenor of Whedon’s counter to all the claims and the retorts of others calling him out as Gadot did, many feel his attempt to absolve himself hasn’t worked. Making it worse for Whedon is the fact that fans on social media are siding again with the victims and Justice League actor Ray Fisher.
Fisher largely sparked the investigation into Whedon’s conduct and the director’s downfall with his series of posts and comments shedding light on circumstances during the reshoots in 2017, which cut out most of Cyborg’s story and screentime that turned out to be hefty in the Snyder Cut.
Whedon drastically reduced Fisher’s number of scenes and crucial status in the plot because his story “logically made no sense” and he considered Fisher “a bad actor.”
Specifically, Whedon told Vulture, “We’re talking about a malevolent force.” He added, “We’re talking about a bad actor in both senses.” Vulture’s Lila Shapiro also claimed, “Whedon insists he spent hours discussing the changes with Fisher and that their conversations were friendly and respectful. None of the claims Fisher made in the media were ‘either true or merited discussing,’ Whedon told me.”
Hearing this, Fisher returned to Twitter and clapped back. “Looks like Joss Whedon got to direct an endgame after all…” adding he will get to work addressing “all of the lies and buffoonery” later this week.
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Concluding the Vulture interview, Whedon blamed Snyder Cut supporters and the internet as the real culprits in this whole mess. “The beginning of the internet raised me up, and the modern internet pulled me down,’’ he said. ‘’The perfect symmetry is not lost on me.”
YouTube pundit Grace Randolph chimed in too and she believes the Internet should leave Whedon alone – to let him self-destruct. “Stop talking about Joss Whedon – just let him slip into oblivion,” she tweeted. “He’s done. He can say whatever he wants but it’s just a death rattle.”
