Olivia Munn is opening up about a traumatic experience she faced on the set of a movie.
In an episode of Monica Lewinsky’s podcast, “Reclaiming,” on Tuesday, the host and her guest discussed their struggles with anxiety over the years.
“I was anxious, but I didn’t understand it was anxiousness,” Munn said. The pair agreed that “anxiety” wasn’t a word they encountered growing up, with Munn’s mother insisting on describing Munn’s worries as her being “stubborn.” Over time, Munn realized that an “underlying part” of who she is her strong reaction to “fairness and unfairness.”
That prompted her to hint at a “traumatic” experience she had while filming.
“There [were] other things that happened on this movie set personally that were really not OK,” Munn said. “I had to file complaints with the studio, and there’s a lot of other little things that go along with it, but it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money.”
The “X-Men: Apocalypse” actor disclosed that she was offered “seven figures” to accept an apology.
“It came along with an NDA,” she said, adding that she would have “never talked about it,” because she “wanted to move past it all.” However, Munn declined to sign the non-disclosure agreement, feeling the offer was deeply wrong.
“This was like the reckoning — the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all,” she continued. “This was that time period, and this was when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying. ‘Oh, you only did it for the money,’ so I was afraid that my voice and speaking up would just reverse any kind of validity to my voice.”
Munn expressed fears of retaliation if she signed the NDA and was “concerned” that it would hinder her ability to speak out against future injustices. So during a meeting with the studio, she turned to her lawyer and told him she was not accepting the offer — a move she attributed on Tuesday to her feistiness from childhood.
It was “not a lot of money to me to lose my voice,” Munn said of declining the offer. She added that she felt “proud of herself” for her decision.
Munn explained that she made the decision out of “anger,” but as she’s gotten older, she has learned to take a step back and carefully consider all options.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t have ended up with the same decision,” she said, “it’s that I made that decision based on anger, and that is something that I had to learn how to rein in and use for my benefit.”