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Celebs Who Turned Their Backs To Woody Allen

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One by one, Hollywood’s biggest names have spent the past few years walking away from Woody Allen — and in 2021, they started saying why out loud.

The backlash against the 85-year-old director didn’t happen overnight. It built through the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, then accelerated hard after HBO’s docuseries “Allen v. Farrow” aired earlier in 2021, reigniting Dylan Farrow’s decades-old sexual abuse allegations against her adoptive father. Allen has always denied the claims, but that hasn’t stopped a growing list of actors — some of them Oscar winners — from apologizing, donating their paychecks, and vowing never to work with him again.

• Drew Barrymore sat down with Dylan Farrow in May 2021 and apologized directly for starring in Allen’s 1996 film “Everyone Says I Love You,” saying she’d been “gaslit” into believing the role was a career milestone.
• Kate Winslet told Vanity Fair in September 2020 she had “bitter regrets” about making “Wonder Wheel” (2017) with Allen, asking pointedly, “What the f*** was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?”
• Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Hall both donated their “A Rainy Day in New York” salaries to Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, RAINN, and the LGBT Center of New York.

The Actresses Who Went Public First

Greta Gerwig, who appeared in Allen’s “To Rome with Love,” told The New York Times back in 2018 that she would never work with the director again. She went further than a simple denouncement, saying she grieved over the realization that her presence in his films had likely added to Dylan Farrow’s pain — a rare admission from an A-lister that her career choices carried real consequences for someone else.

Mira Sorvino, who won an Oscar for Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite,” wrote an open letter apologizing for dismissing the allegations years earlier as what she called a naive young actress. Her reversal mattered because Sorvino’s career had been closely tied to Allen’s patronage in the mid-1990s, making her apology one of the more personally costly ones on record.

Barrymore’s Reckoning On Camera

Barrymore’s May 2021 interview with Dylan Farrow stood out because it wasn’t a statement or a tweet — it was a face-to-face conversation, aired for an audience, where Barrymore said she’d been “gaslit” into believing “Everyone Says I Love You” was a career milestone, not the regret she now called it 25 years later.

“What the f*** was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?”

That line from Winslet, delivered to Vanity Fair, became the sentence that seemed to sum up the entire industry’s reversal — a two-time Oscar winner publicly questioning her own past choices in the bluntest terms possible.

Elliot Page And The Others Who Walked Away

Elliot Page, who also appeared in “To Rome with Love,” called the film “the biggest regret of my career.” Colin Firth, Rachel Brosnahan, David Krumholtz, and Griffin Newman all issued similar public renunciations, each pledging they’d never work with Allen again. None of them softened it with a “no comment” or a carefully lawyered statement — they named the project, named the regret, and moved on.

This wave of actors distancing themselves fits into a broader pattern the industry has seen repeatedly since 2017, one covered extensively among the year’s most controversial celebrity moments — where public apology has become the standard response once allegations reach a certain threshold of attention.

Money As A Statement

Donating a salary isn’t just symbolic bookkeeping — for Chalamet and Hall, it meant routing “A Rainy Day in New York” paychecks specifically to Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, RAINN, and the LGBT Center of New York, three organizations with direct ties to survivor advocacy. It’s the same playbook other stars have used when trying to publicly sever ties with a project or person after the fact, a pattern that’s shown up repeatedly in stories of once-close Hollywood relationships falling apart under scrutiny.

Allen’s response to all of this has stayed largely the same: denial, and a legal team pushing back on “Allen v. Farrow” as one-sided. But with Barrymore’s on-camera apology to Dylan Farrow still fresh from May 2021, the list of actors willing to work with him again keeps getting shorter — and the ones who already did are still the ones answering for it.