‘It’s been a hard year’
Mira Sorvino on ‘Startup’ and the cost of saying #MeToo
NEW YORK — When Mira Sorvino was 10 years old and her parents were in the hospital with her newborn brother, she finished readNing
“The Diary of Anne Frank” and burst out crying. Her German baby sitter, Paula, heard her weeping and came to see what was wrong.
“I said, this is so terrible, all these lives just snuffed out. All this possibility just gone. This little girl was like me. And she said, ‘No, no, they’re all lying. Many more Germans died than Jews. Only 600,000, not 6 million,’ ” Sorvino recalled recently, with disbelief on her face. “I was 10, but I was old enough to know that what she was saying was wrong.”
She told her parents about the experience, which, says the actress, is “burned into my memory, and made me committed to all these social justice causes.” It also provided an early lesson in the importance of speaking out — something the 51-year-old Oscar winner has come to be known for in the past year, since she went on the record to accuse film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and helped ignite the #MeToo movement.
Over a long, candid and sometimes difficult conversation, Sorvino opened up about the role she has played in the global reckoning and the painful memories it has dredged up. But she also expressed excitement and optimism about her career. After decades away from the spotlight, she is in the midst of a hard-fought comeback.
In the past year, she’s played a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque lifestyle entrepreneur on ABC’s “Modern Family” and a CIA officer in the miniseries “Condor” on AT&T’s Audience network. She has a role in the upcoming buddy movie “Stuber,” with Kumail Nanjiani, and can currently be seen in the tech drama “Startup” as Rebecca Stroud, an oddball NSA agent who eats the same fast-food burger every day because she’s scared of foodborne illness.
She describes the series, which is available on the streaming network Sony Crackle, as “Shakespeare set in the tech world.” Her character speaks with traces of a Southern accent. The actress has a knack for distinctive voice work, dating to “Mighty Aphrodite,” in which she played a prostitute who spoke in unforgettable highpitched yet raspy tones, and “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion,” in which she portrayed a Valley Girl.
In the Sorvino household in suburban Tenafly, N.J., everyone did voices around the dinner table — especially her father, actor Paul Sorvino.
Though the “Goodfellas” star encouraged his children to pursue other careers, young Sorvino wanted to be an actor, an astronaut or an anthropologist when she grew up. Performing was always in the picture.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Sorvino majored in East Asian literature and culture, writing a thesis about racial conflict in China. Although she loved academics, she occasionally auditioned for film roles and sometimes felt conflicted about which path to follow. She was visiting her father in California during summer vacation when she found out, in the same day, that she’d been passed over for parts in “Mystic Pizza” and “Dead Poets Society.” The elder Sorvino had his friend, Warren Beatty, call and tell her to stay in school. She listened.
After graduation, Sorvino read scripts for Robert De Niro’s company, Tribeca Productions, but soon decided to focus all her energy on acting. In quick succession, she was cast in Whit Stillman’s “Barcelona” and Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show.” Then in 1995 came “Mighty Aphrodite,” a Woody Allen comedy about a man (Allen) who discovers the biological mother of his gifted adopted son happens to be a sex worker. Sorvino remains one of the few performers to win an Academy Award for a comedic performance, but fairly or not, she’s sometimes cited as a victim of the Oscar curse. While she starred opposite Lisa Kudrow in “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion,” a highly quotable cult comedy, and in “Mimic,” a sci-fi thriller about deadly cockroaches directed by Guillermo del Toro, her career cooled in the years that followed her Oscar win.
She returned to the public consciousness last October, when she became one of the first Hollywood stars to go on the record with allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein. In a New Yorker article written by Ronan Farrow, whose estranged father had directed her in “Mighty Aphrodite,” Sorvino accused Weinstein, who distributed the film, of making unwanted physical contact and “chasing her” around a hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1995. In a later incident, she said the film producer had shown up uninvited at her apartment in the middle of the night with what she felt were malign intentions. (Weinstein has denied all charges of sexual misconduct.)
She long suspected that reporting the incident — she told an employee at Miramax — had a negative effect on her career. That hunch was seemingly confirmed when director Peter Jackson said he was told by Miramax to avoid casting Sorvino and Ashley Judd, another of Weinstein’s accusers, in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy because they were “nightmare(s).” Filmmaker Terry Zwigoff said he was discouraged from working with Sorvino in “Bad Santa” for similar reasons.
“The idea that there was this malevolent hand that actually had changed the course of my professional life was devastating to me,” she says. “I was like, that’s why I’ve had a bad downturn in my career. Why I couldn’t be in any studio movies for a decade and a half. I won an Oscar. My work hasn’t changed.”
Even after her own encounters with Weinstein, Sorvino says she was “absolutely shocked by the extent” of the accusations against him and also by the pervasiveness of the abuse that has come to light elsewhere in society.
Being at the center of a cultural sea change has been challenging for Sorvino.
“It’s been a hard year, not going to lie,” she says, her eyes welling up and her body tensing as she speaks. “What happened with Harvey Weinstein was not the first thing to happen to me.”
Sorvino says she was violently sexually assaulted as a teenager, an attack that “was quite severe and terrifying and life-threatening.” Although she reported it to the police, “Nothing was done about it. It taught a very bad lesson to my teenage self that if you do go to the authorities, nothing happens.”
In another incident from her teenage years, a casting director tied her to a chair and gagged her with a condom — presumably as part of an audition, but clearly inappropriate.
“All of those traumas resurfaced once I came out about Harvey,” she says. The reckoning forced Sorvino to reconsider “Mighty Aphrodite,” the film that made her a star. In an open letter published in January by HuffPost, she apologized to Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow, saying she now believed the allegations and vowed she would never work with the filmmaker again.