Busy Phillips on How ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Creators Protected Her to Start Her Career

Since the beginning of the Me Too movement, there has been a lot of discussion about how Hollywood treats women in the industry. In a new interview on The Daily Beast‘s The Last Laugh podcast, actress Busy Philipps opened up about her start on the cult classic show Freaks and Geeks and how she thinks the creator Paul Feig and executive producer Judd Apatow protected her and the other actresses on the show. While she explained that there was plenty of negative pressure, the “messaging wasn’t really coming from within the house,” Philipps explained to host Matt Wilstein. “It was more really the industry at large.”

“I do think that Paul and Judd tried in their way to protect Linda [Cardellini] and me from a lot of the insidious nature of the messaging that gets sent to young women and teen girls on network television shows,” Philipps said. “Because I do remember Paul talking to us about like, ‘I don’t want you guys to think that there are any diets or anything.’” However, it was a different situation when she joined Dawson’s Creek.

“I mean, when I got on Dawson’s Creek, there was this whole discussion about the moles on my neck and my face,” Philipps revealed. “And they tried to cover them with makeup. It was a directive from the network. I guess they found them offensive. My skin offended them. But it was so wild to me.”

Philipps also touched on her former working relationship with James Franco and his recently fractured partnership with Seth Rogen. In her 2018 memoir, This Will Only Hurt a Little, Philipps revealed that Franco once forcibly pushed her to the ground on set. She told Wilstein that she “guessed” she was surprised. “I have to say, I mean, it’s interesting. They were super close, and they had a very tight relationship. And so I don’t have any information,” the Girls5Eva actress explained. “I haven’t spent my days doing deep dives into what it all was. I didn’t work with James past age 20, so I can only speak to the horrible behavior I experienced.” Philipps also explained that she didn’t want tp “speculate about their friendship,” but that she “wouldn’t want to work with someone who has multiple allegations of predatory behavior.”

Philipps was also hesitant to describe Me Too as a “reckoning,” pointing out that in many ways the industry is the same as it has always been. “I think at this point, I’m not at risk. I’m an almost-42-year-old woman who wrote a book where I named names of the people who were f—— d—- to me So I don’t think that I’m the person to ask about whether the industry has changed. Because I would assume that people are going to be smart enough to not f— with me,” Philipps said. “I’m not an ingenue coming onto the scene or a young woman coming onto the scene wanting to work and make it happen. The predators, I’m sure, still exist, and a few of the big ones have been rooted out, thank God, but whether there’s a reckoning, I don’t know.”