At the start of her film acting career, Minnie Driver stood up for herself after being humiliated in an audition. How do you like them chocolates?
In an excerpt from her new memoir Managing Expectations, released May 3 and obtained by E! News, the Good Will Hunting actress describes trying out for a part in a chocolate product commercial in her native London soon after she filmed the 1995 movie Circle of Friends, her big-screen debut. Driver, 52, said that inside the room was a male director and more than a dozen people, mostly men from an ad agency. She said she received no script for the commercial.
Driver said in her book that the director asked her, "You've seen the movie When Harry Met Sally?" adding, "You know the scene where she fakes an orgasm? OK. Eat a piece of chocolate and do that."
Driver said she responded, "Fake an orgasm?" and that the director replied, chuckling, "Yes. Unless you fancy having a real one."
The actress said the director told her to do it twice, once "normally" and then again in a "bigger" way, saying that take would be used for a Dutch market.
Driver said she wanted to run out of the room and warn her fellow actresses waiting outside for their chance to audition, or, as she put it, "vying for an opportunity that was actually humiliation dressed up in a pick-me! outfit" or "being lunchtime entertainment for a bunch of pervy execs."
Instead, she chewed a piece of chocolate while faking an orgasm, mimicking the iconic 1989 movie scene with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. Driver said she then said she didn't think she could do it again, to which one of the ad men allegedly responded, "Course you can, love, that's the best bit about being a girl!"
Driver said she then told the group she wouldn't do it again because she "will throw up" and that the director then "sneered," "rolled his eyes," and told her, "Well, all the other girls have apparently very much enjoyed this."
The actress said she gathered her coat and said, "They were faking it."
Driver wrote that after the audition, she returned home to an answering machine message telling her that people had said she was "difficult" at the tryout. "I knew I'd now been marked," she said. "Branded with a scarlet D that often comes with saying 'no' as an actress."
Driver had spoken about the experience before, calling it her worst audition in an interview with Backstage in 2018.
"I would categorically put this in some version of the #MeToo world I grew up in," she said. "The audition was for a chocolate bar commercial. These ad guys never show up to an audition (it's usually just a casting director), but I went in, and there were 10 guys with their jackets off, one female casting director, a stool, and broken-up bits of candy. The premise of the ad was the orgasm scene of When Harry Met Sally, and basically she was supposed to take one bite of the chocolate and have an orgasm."
Driver continued, "I f--king did it. I knew it was wrong, and I still did it. I was embarrassed and mortified, and I didn't understand it until years later. That feeling didn't leave me for a long time. And to this day, I wish someone in that room had stood up and said, 'This is outrageous,' because these guys were getting their jollies off, watching woman after woman pretend to have an orgasm. I don't think it would happen today, thank goodness, which is some kind of progress."