Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega briefly discovered themselves subjected to some on-line backlash in January once they co-starred in “Miller’s Woman,” Jade Halley Bartlett’s movie about an 18-year-old scholar who develops a crush on her 49-year-old English instructor and enters a romantic relationship with him. However whereas some followers have been offended by the movie’s content material and the truth that the 2 actors needed to movie intimate scenes regardless of a 31 yr age hole between them — an argument that has been stoked by the movie’s resurgence on Netflix — Freeman stands by his involvement within the movie.
In a current interview with The Instances of London, Freeman lamented the truth that the movie has been the topic of on-line ire. The British actor referred to as it “a disgrace” that the movie, which he described as “grown-up and nuanced,” was being interpreted as scandalous. He went on to attract a distinction between committing malicious acts in actual life and portraying them onscreen, explaining that actors shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions of their fictional characters.
“It’s not saying, ‘Isn’t this nice?’” Freeman stated of the movie’s portrayal of student-teacher relationships. “Are we going to have a go at Liam Neeson for being in a movie in regards to the Holocaust?”
Regardless of the refrain of destructive voices who disapproved of the movie’s premise, many critics who engaged with its substance identified that Bartlett discovered a technique to provide a nuanced portrayal of a problematic scenario.
“The intricacy of the place to position blame in ‘Miller’s Woman’ makes the movie one price speaking about. [Ortega’s character] alleges that Mr. Miller constructed the atmosphere by which the strains between instructor and scholar have been blurred; whereas their relationship was by no means bodily intimate, the shared reliance on one another for inspiration made for an inappropriate layer,” IndieWire’s Samantha Bergeson wrote in her assessment of the movie. “There isn’t a hero or villain, solely a murky undercurrent questioning whether or not having a muse is inherently predatory or not. And that story is price writing.”