Olivia Munn is pulling back the curtain on a tense on-set standoff that brought filming to a halt — all over who got to play the hero.
Speaking during a recent appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, the actor recalled a moment early in her career when a male co-star objected to a scene in which her character saved his. The disagreement escalated quickly, ultimately pausing production for nearly an hour.
“There have been a few times where I’ve been filming something, and my character was either like CIA, or a cop, or something, and there’s been scenes where my character has been the one to save the other character,” Munn said.
The scene in question placed both actors in a bunker, fighting side by side. As scripted, they were each covering different angles before switching positions — a move that would lead to Munn’s character taking out an attacker about to shoot her co-star from behind.
“If you read the script, it was that he was guarding his side, I was guarding my side, then we switch sides and then there’s a guy that was coming for him [who] was gonna shoot him in the back, so I shoot him,” she recalled. “And then we’re about to shoot and, somehow, I guess he didn’t read the script, and in that moment, he realized, ‘Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. She can’t save me. No, no. She can’t save me.’”
What followed, according to Munn, was a prolonged standoff. The actor said her co-star stopped production entirely and challenged the scene, arguing against the idea of being rescued by her character.
Munn described the moment as unexpectedly public and drawn out. “No insecurity about being obnoxious and everyone hearing this and being like, ‘She can’t save me! We’re not doing this,’” she said.
After 45 minutes of back-and-forth, Munn stepped in with a compromise to move things forward.
“Finally, after like 45 minutes of just stopping down, I said, ‘OK, how about instead of my character saving you, it’s just that we switch because it’s time for us to switch and so this is my guy to get,’” she said. “And he was like, ‘OK.’”
It’s not the first time Munn has spoken candidly about difficult dynamics behind the scenes. In a previous appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, she shared another experience involving a director she worked with on HBO’s The Newsroom.
According to Munn, the director attempted to derail her chances of landing a film role by portraying her as difficult to work with.
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“I was on the one-yard-line for the movie and my manager calls me and says, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get the role. But first, I guess there’s another director who they know and he says that on “The Newsroom” you were late all the time and really combative,’” Munn said.
“I lived seven minutes from there. I was never late. I was like, ‘I know who this is.’ He just was trying to bash me. And I told my reps, ‘Please tell the directors this.’ And then I still got the role. But I will always remember that just because of our conflicts of how we approached a role, he wanted to ruin my chances of getting anything else.”
