Olivia Munn is opening up about a harrowing experience she once had on set.
The Newsroom alum revealed that she went through a "traumatic" incident on a movie set where things happened to her "that were really not okay," so much so that she reported the event to the movie studio.
"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," Munn said on the Feb. 18 episode of Monica Lewinsky's podcast Reclaiming. "Seven figures to accept I guess their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it, but it came along with an NDA."
The X-Men: Apocalypse actress, who didn’t share which film the experience happened on, explained that she never would've discussed the matter publicly because she "just wanted to move past it all"—which is why she didn't recount "specific things" about the incident to Lewinsky—but she couldn't get herself to sign the NDA.
"I just felt it was so wrong," Munn shared. "And at this time specifically, this was in the beginning of the MeToo/TimesUp."
"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 reverse any kind of validity to my voice."
Munn—who shares son Malcolm Mulaney, 3, and daughter Méi Mulaney, 5 months, with husband John Mulaney—went on to explain that part of her hesitancy to sign an NDA was a fear that the unnamed movie studio "would leak it out."
So while the Buddy Games actress took a meeting with lawyers on both sides of the issue in which she was offered a settlement, she ultimately went with her gut and turned it down.
"We walked out of there,” she continued, “and I remember feeling so proud when I walked out—so proud of myself."
In the time since, the actress has taken time to unpack why she made the decision that she did and where that gut instinct came from.
"That comes into the feistiness of not thinking things through and being so upset and frustrated that this would be the offer to me," she shared. "I did not think about negotiating. I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was."
And while she would make the same decision again, she would perhaps have thought through it a bit more before coming to that conclusion.
"Look, was it the right thing to do and do the people in my life think that I did the right thing and are proud of me for that? Yes," she mused. "It's not that I wouldn't have ended up with the same decision, it's that I made that decision based on anger, and that is something I had to learn how to do rein in and use for my benefit."
The actress is no stranger to speaking up about injustices on set. Back in 2018, Munn went public about an incident surrounding her film Predator which involved her successfully advocating to 20th Century Fox for a scene involving Steven Wilder Striegel to be cut from the movie after the actress learned that he was a registered sex offender.
"I kind of feel like I’m the one going to jail," she said in an interview with Vanity Fair at the time, referencing the fact that Striegel had served six months behind bars after pleading guilty to two felonies. "I didn’t go to jail, I didn’t put this guy on our set. I had this scene deleted."