Actress Says Director on Popular HBO Show ‘Wanted to Ruin Her Chances’ of Getting Jobs Following Disagreement

Olivia Munn is opening up about how a conflict she had with a director on The Newsroom almost impacted her career later on.

The actress revealed on Dax Shepherd’s Armchair Expert podcast Monday that an unnamed male director kept pushing her to act in a way she felt didn’t fit her character, Sloan Smith, on the set of the HBO show.

“There was a storyline where my character and Tom Sadoski’s character are dating and falling in love,” Munn said on the podcast. “[The director] kept trying to force me to carry that storyline only on my side. He’s like, ‘Can you look out at him and smile?’ And I’m like, ‘Why she’s busy doing this?’ Or, ‘Can you stop and snuggle up to him or flirt with him?’ Or, ‘Can you give him a kiss?’ And I’m like, ‘This is in the middle of working.’”

The Your Friends & Neighbors star said that she later learned that the same director had been spreading rumors that she was difficult to work with.

“I was on the one-yard line for the movie, and my manager calls me and says, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get the role. But first, I guess there’s another director who they know and he says that on The Newsroom you were late all the time and really combative,’” Munn recalled. “I lived seven minutes from there. I was never late. I was like, ‘I know who this is.’”

She continued, “He just was trying to bash me. And I told my reps, ‘Please tell the directors this.’ And then I still got the role. But I will always remember that just because of our conflicts of how we approached a role, he wanted to ruin my chances of getting anything else.”

Munn has spoken out about on-set mistreatment in the past, accusing director Brett Ratner of sexual harassment in 2017 and a year later coming forward to reveal that she had previously reported to 20th Century Fox on the set of Predators that director Shane Black hired his friend, registered sex offender Steven Wilder Striegel, to appear in a small part opposite her.

In February 2025, Munn revealed on Monica Lewinsky’s Reclaiming podcast that she once turned down a studio’s offer worth millions of dollars to sign an NDA after a “traumatic” incident on a movie set.

“I remember feeling so proud when I walked out — so proud of myself,” Munn said. “I did not think about negotiating. I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was. … 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. 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 rein in and use for my benefit.”