Laurie Metcalf Defends Scott Rudin Amid Profession Resurgence

Laurie Metcalf knew the query was coming “at some point” so she got here ready, however when The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman lastly requested about her many collaborations with producer Scott Rudin, the Tony Award winner “fumbled her words” as she defended his comeback.

“It’s so touchy. It’s so hard,” she mentioned in a lengthy profile printed at this time to advertise their newest partnership, the brand new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, now on stage at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre. “He talked about his therapy, he apologized, he owned what he said, he reflected on it,” she mentioned as she learn from notes, per Schulman. “He was in the process of rehabilitation. So I just think that, unless we think there is no possibility of real rehabilitation, then we shouldn’t ask people to try and do it.”

The once-prolific producer was a Hollywood powerhouse who churned out movies and stage productions at a powerful clip for many years. That was till a Hollywood Reporter investigation printed in 2021 detailed a number of allegations of abusive conduct from former staffers who declare they witnessed him throwing objects, berating staff and, in a single occasion, slamming a pc monitor on an assistant’s hand. The staffer wound up within the emergency room. “Everyone just knows he’s an absolute monster,” mentioned one worker.

Rudin retreated from his profession for a number of years and hung out in remedy. In a New York Times interview printed in March 2025, Rudin took duty for a lot of his actions and mentioned that he had much more self-control. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy,” he mentioned. “I don’t want to let anybody down.”

The interview got here as he was mounting a profession comeback with Barry Diller to provide Samuel D. Hunter’s Little Bear Ridge Road starring Metcalf and Micah Stock, a manufacturing that had a restricted run. “I’m going to try to come back and make some more good work, and people will feel how they feel,” Rudin mentioned on the time. “And if some people are really angry about it, they’ll have the right to be angry about it.”

With Death of a Salesman, Metcalf was “doubling down” on her partnership with Rudin by starring in back-to-back productions for the “controversial figure,” per The New Yorker. Their historical past runs deeper. Rudin is credited with suggesting Metcalf for a component in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which landed her an Oscar nomination. She received back-to-back Tony Awards for A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Three Tall Women, each produced by Rudin.

As it seems, Metcalf was key to Rudin’s comeback. Little Bear Ridge Road was initially commissioned by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a Chicago firm that Metcalf co-founded. She starred in Steppenwolf’s authentic 2024 manufacturing, and when Rudin supplied to carry it to Broadway, Steppenwolf declined to work with him, per The New Yorker.

“It didn’t feel in alignment with our values and mission that he would come back on Steppenwolf’s name,” a supply advised Schulman. “In a precarious moment where we were rebuilding back from the pandemic, why would we partner with someone who the industry felt really harmed by? We can’t be a vehicle for someone to prove that they’ve changed.”

The scenario grew difficult and left Metcalf “distraught” per The New Yorker. She “took the extraordinary step of threatening to quit Steppenwolf” until the theater firm — co-founded by Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise and John Malkovich — gave up its rights to the manufacturing which it did. Asked by Schulman to clarify what occurred, Metcalf broke down in tears.

“I can’t really go into that, because that’s something I haven’t even figured out for myself, my relationship back there,” she mentioned, including that she’s not been concerned in Steppenwolf’s milestone fiftieth anniversary season. She’s nonetheless figuring that out, too. “I want my own celebration of that, and I want to celebrate it with some of the Old Guard. I want to go back in time, and I want to be brave with the people who taught me to be brave. I don’t want to worry if something is not P.C.— not to trigger people. Just to be daring.”

Daring, like being the primary high-profile Hollywood abilities to work with Rudin. “I find it hypocritical that some people want to work with him but didn’t want to be the first,” she mentioned.