SYDNEY — A star of the prison comedy drama, “Orange is the New Black,” said she was the victim of sustained sexual interest from actor Geoffrey Rush, culminating in the Academy Award winner exposing himself to the much younger actress and peering at her while she showered.
Yael Stone, an Australian actress who plays inmate Lorna Morello in the Netflix hit, told a television interviewer that she played along with his flirtation and sexual banter during a Sydney theatrical production in 2010 and 2011 because she was terrified of upsetting such a powerful figure of the acting world.
Rush, 59 at the time, was a star of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Stone was an unknown 25-year-old. Performing a play in Sydney about a clerk under the Russian Czars, Stone said the older man would text her into the night, sharing a playful but increasingly sexual banter that made her feel deeply uncomfortable.
“I didn’t know how to stop the texts,” the actress told the Australian Broadcasting Corp, according to an article on its website. “I was enthusiastically trying to keep up with this banter.”
The allegations by Stone, which Rush said were misunderstandings or untrue, demonstrate how the #MeToo movement continues to reverberate through industries around the world.
[Geoffrey Rush claims to be ‘virtually housebound’ since #MeToo accusation]
Even when Rush surreptitiously watched Stone bathing, she took no formal action to stop his behavior, she told the broadcaster, because she feared for her own career and the damage to the play.
“I looked up and saw a small shaving mirror being held over the top of the cubicle, to be used in a way to look down at my naked body,” she said. “I believe it was made in the spirit of a joke. The fact is it made me incredibly uncomfortable.
“I think I dealt with it by words to the effect of, ‘bugger off, Geoffrey.’”
In another incident, Stone said Rush entered a dressing room used by the cast not wearing clothes.
“He came in from the shower holding his towel and he was naked and he danced around in front of me with his penis out,” she said.
The claims are particularly dangerous for Rush, who is suing a tabloid newspaper in Sydney for accusing him of engaging in similar harassment of another young actress in a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The paper had dubbed him “King Leer” and is facing a hefty compensation bill under Australia’s tough defamation laws.
Rush denied harassing Stone, but has offered an apology.
“The allegations of inappropriate behavior made by Yael Stone are incorrect and in some instances have been taken completely out of context,” he said in a written statement to the ABC.
“I sincerely and deeply regret if I have caused her any distress. As I have said in the past, I abhor any behavior that might be considered as harassment or intimidation to anyone.”
Rush won an Academy Award for best actor in the 1996 film “Shine” and has received numerous other nominations, most recently best supporting actor for the man who taught Colin Firth’s King George VI public speaking in the 2010 film “The King’s Speech.”
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