Director Michael Bay is kind of a jerk, and everybody knows it.
While promoting her new movie, Love & Friendship on The Graham Norton Show in the UK on May 27th, Kate Beckinsale brought up the fact that her Pearl Harbor director, Michael Bay was very good at body-shaming women.
“I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren’t bigger than my head and I wasn’t blonde,” Beckinsale said when they made the 2001 blockbuster.
“I’d just had my daughter and had lost weight, but I was told that if I got the part, I’d have to work out. And I just didn’t understand why a 1940s nurse would do that.”
(For the record, Beckinsale has admitted to having an eating disorder in the past)
Even after filming wrapped, Bay was still obnoxious as hell.
“When we were promoting the film, Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben and Josh, and he said, ‘I have worked with Ben before and I love him, and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor,’” Beckinsale recalled.
“Then when he was asked about me, he’d say, ‘Kate wasn’t so attractive that she would alienate the female audience.’ He kept saying it everywhere we went — and we went to a lot of places!”
Beckinsale isn’t the first actress to call out Bay for his somewhat misogynistic tendancies.
Megan Fox claimed he was a nightmare to work for during Transformers.
“He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation,” Fox told Wonderland in 2009.
“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward.
“He has no social skills at all. And it’s endearing to watch him. He’s vulnerable and fragile in real life and then on set he’s a tyrant.”
That…sounds like someone I would never want to have dinner with. Ever.
