Anna Kendrick weighed in on the controversy surrounding the recently surfaced interview with Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci, and she pointed out one piece of the conversation that’s been largely missing.
As previously reported, Bertolucci admitted in a 2013 Q&A filmed at Paris’ La Cinémathèque française that the infamous butter rape scene in his hit 1972 flick was not consensual — meaning, he and leading man Marlon Brando came up with the conceit the morning of the shoot.
“The sequence of the butter is an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting," he said in the interview. “We were having, with Marlon, breakfast on the floor of the flat where I was shooting. There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted.” (In the scene, Brando uses the stick of butter as sexual lubricant on Maria Schneider’s character.)
Celebrities immediately slammed the famed director and the legendary actor for their actions. Among them was The Avengers star Chris Evans, who tweeted that he felt “rage” upon learning the news.
Kendrick, 31, who costarred with Evans, 35, in 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, took the opportunity to point out that the non-consensual nature of the scene was something the late Schneider had brought up during a 2007 interview, but that it was largely ignored.
“Ms Schneider stated this several years ago,” she tweeted at Evans. “I used to get eye-rolls when I brought it up to people (aka dudes).”
Evans, who seemed to have learned about the disturbing details of the scene for the first time earlier this week, tweeted back: “Had no idea. Woulda felt rage then too. They should be in jail.”
Kendrick concurred that the problem was a very real one, though she made it a point to underline how telling the public’s response was to Schneider and Bertolucci’s statements.
“I don’t doubt it,” she replied. “It wasn’t treated like a big story then (shocker). Glad at least it will be taken seriously now.”
In a 2007 interview with The Daily Mail, Schneider recalled of the day, “Marlon said to me, ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
