Kate Beckinsale Shares Several Stories of On-Set Harassment in Solidarity With Blake Lively

"What [Lively's lawsuit] has highlighted is this machine that goes into effect when a woman complains about something legitimately offensive, upsetting, harmful, or whatever in this industry," Beckinsale said in a video on Instagram.

By Audra Heinrichs | December 31, 2024 | 11:18am

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Kate Beckinsale Shares Several Stories of On-Set Harassment in Solidarity With Blake Lively

In the days following Blake Lively’s bombshell lawsuit against her former co-star and director, Justin Baldoni, multiple female actors—from Abigail Breslin to Lively’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-stars—have voiced support for Lively and gotten candid about their own experiences of sexism and harassment on film sets.

On Monday, Kate Beckinsale joined the chorus and detailed the myriad harassment she’s experienced. In a nearly five-minute-long video posted to Instagram, the actor began by clarifying that while she doesn’t know Lively, nor was she familiar with the goings-on during the production of It Ends With Us, the claims in Lively’s suit against Baldoni deeply resonated with her.

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“I’ve never met either of them and I wasn’t on the set, so I can’t speak to any of that,” Beckinsale told followers. “But what I will say is, what it has highlighted is this machine that goes into effect when a woman complains about something legitimately offensive, upsetting, harmful, or whatever in this industry.”

Beckinsale never gets specific about who harassed her or on what set, but she does describe the multiple on-set presences who failed to defend her against abusive co-stars and gaslit her when she tried to voice her concerns. In one instance, Beckinsale recalled attempting to advocate for herself opposite a male co-star who was “drunk every day.”

“He’s obviously going through something, and I have full sympathy for that, but I’m also waiting, as was the crew, for six hours a day for him to learn his lines,” Beckinsale recalled. “It means I’m not getting to see my daughter in the evenings, ever, for the whole movie. The studio’s response was to give me a bike so I could ride around the studio lot while I was waiting. And then, of course, I was called a cunt and a bitch. At one point during a take, I was called ‘you stupid bitch.’”

Beckinsale also described other sets where she was “put on such a strict diet and exercise program” that she lost her periods, and that on one occasion, a group of people stood in front of her, scrutinized her appearance, and asked, “How do we make her attractive?”

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In two other instances, she recalled being put in an “unsafe fight situation” and that on one of the sets, a male co-star physically hurt her during one fight sequence. When she spoke up about it, she claimed she was “ostracized.”

“Sometimes there’s a certain kind of actor who gets kind of a thrill out of legally being able to harm a woman during a fight sequence,” Beckinsale said. “And I was harmed, to the point where there were MRIs proving it. And actually what happened was I was gaslit and made to feel like I was the problem, blamed and ostracized, and left out of cast dinners, not spoken to, as soon as I mentioned there was a problem.”

Later in the video, Beckinsale said she was forced to do a photoshoot just one day after suffering a miscarriage.

“I said, ‘I can’t. I’m bleeding. I don’t want to go and change my clothes in front of people I don’t know and do a photoshoot. I’m bleeding out a miscarriage,’” Beckinsale recalled telling her publicist. “And she was like, ‘You have to, or you’ll be sued.’”

Beckinsale concluded the video by saying she had “about 47 million” other stories from toxic and unethical sets to share, and that she’s remained largely silent on all she’s gone through out of fear of retribution.

“If you mention it, you’re fucked,” Beckinsale said. “It’s supposed to be, you absorb it and somehow you’re the homie. That has got to stop. That has to stop. And I am grateful to Blake Lively for highlighting this is not an archaic problem no one is facing. This is continuing. And then when it does happen, a machine goes in place to absolutely destroy you.”

Lively’s suit and the subsequent investigation published by the New York Times alleged just that. Following the production of It Ends With Us, where Lively said she repeatedly attempted to voice concerns about Baldoni’s behavior, she claimed Baldoni and a team of crisis publicists launched a smear campaign against her. According to the NYT, they “went hard at the press, pushing to prevent stories about Mr. Baldoni’s behavior and reinforce negative ones about Ms. Lively.”

In the video’s caption, Beckinsale wrote: “There are far too many casualties of this, many of whom I know personally, and it really falls to both men and women in our industry to be part of stamping this out for good.”