Asia Argento on Dark Glasses: ‘I'm not the typical victim'
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Loading... - Michael Fischer
- 06 Oct 2022
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There was a time when Asia Argento was acting for the likes of Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette), Gus Van Sant (Last Days) and George Romero (Land of the Dead). There was even a flirtation with Hollywood, as she co-starred with Vin Diesel in the hit spy thriller XXX.
Then it all stopped. Suddenly, around 2013, the Italian actress-director’s yearning to go on camera disappeared. “I was like: ‘I don’t want to act any more’,” she admits. “And now it’s coming back. So I want to keep this desire burning.”
It’s not hard to glean why her love of acting evaporated. Now 46, for the past few years, she’s been in the public eye far more because of her involvement in the Harvey Weinstein scandal than her work.
In the 2017 New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow, one of the investigative pieces that led to exposing Weinstein’s horrifying sexual misconduct, she revealed she was sexually assaulted by the Hollywood producer in 1997. A year later, giving a speech in Cannes, the very place where the assault had happened, she called the film festival Weinstein’s “hunting ground”.
Despite Weinstein’s ultimate imprisonment in 2020, following the creation of the #MeToo movement as more came forward with tales of abuse in the industry, it wasn’t as if the floodgates opened and Argento was deluged with work offers.
But gradually she’s coming back on screen. This month sees the UK unveiling of Dark Glasses, a new gory thriller in which she co-stars. Directed by her father, the legendary Italian film-maker Dario Argento, it’s the first step, perhaps, to resuscitating her movie career.
When we meet in a Berlin hotel room today, she looks back on the events of 2017-18 with disbelief. “Look, it was an accident, so to speak. It wasn’t something that I said to myself to do. I was nobody’s spokesperson,” she says.
“I told my truth and then it was like a tsunami. It was huge. It was bigger than what I would have thought and I took a lot of stories of these women with me. It was a very painful moment in my life. And now it’s over. I’m glad… that’s behind [me]. I realised that I could have a strong voice in helping this [cause] because I’m not the typical victim.”
Argento’s whole world was collapsing, but she felt her stance against Weinstein “empowered other women who didn’t want to feel the victim” to come forward. “I feel like a survivor, not a victim,” she says now. Read More...
