It began in April of this year, as Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans were finishing up their latest season of Fox’s Lethal Weapon. It started with rumors of Clayne’s toxic behavior, his verbal abuse of below-the-line staffers and coworkers. Clayne offered up an apology which did nothing but convince me that he really is a total douchebag. Soon he was fired, and replaced with Seann William Scott. That didn’t stop the stories from leaking out – Damon Wayans detailed on social media how aggressively toxic Clayne was on and off the set, and someone on the show leaked audio of Clayne acting like a total douche to Wayans and other coworkers.
Before that story broke in April, I wouldn’t have been able to pick Clayne Crawford out of a line-up. It was the first time I had even heard his name. He does have fans, but let’s be real: it’s not like he’s some massive A-lister. I would struggle to even call him a B-lister. He was a dude on a successful television action-drama, which makes him C-list in the grand scheme of things. But the unearned entitlement, the toxic white privilege and the white mediocrity was oozing off of him like he had ten Oscars on his shelf. And before anyone is like “what does race have to do with it” – he verbally harassed and abused his African-American costar, a 57-year-old man who has been working in the industry for 30 years. And show me where a young actor of color would have been given the unchecked privilege to behave the way Clayne has behaved, and is still behaving. Clayne sat down for the Drinkin’ Bros podcast, and he told “his side” of the story. Some highlights:
The claim that he was yelling at children next to a pool during filming: He says it was a “blatant f—king lie.” He stated that they were taking eight hours to film a three-page scene and everyone was getting frustrated. He said he was yelling at the AD whose job it was to keep things quiet on set because he felt the entire thing felt “creatively disrespectful…I snapped. Should I have gone to my trailer? 100 percent. Should I have just gone and waited? That’s what I was instructed to do when there was a problem — you go sit in your trailer and you lock your door and you take a nap. Hollywood is very sensitive, so I should not have screamed and yelled, right, because it’s a bunch of very delicate flowers out there.”
The tapes of him losing his sh-t on everyone: “I knew that they were going to release these tapes because they’d been blackmailing me with them for months and months and months, the entire second season… And I have all the text messages from these people and voicemails from these people saying, ‘Obviously you’re not the problem, but you’ve got to get ahead of this because you know they’re going to use those tapes against you.’”
He spoke to Warner Bros. Television boss Peter Roth about his fights with Damon Wayans: “He said, ‘Clayne, I can’t promise you that I can save your job, but what I can tell you is that you have to make a public announcement apologizing, publicly, to Damon Wayans.’ I was like, ‘What the f—k, Peter, why would I apologize publicly because he and I had a riff on set?’ And he’s like, ‘Clayne, that statement alone tells me you don’t want to come back.’” He added that the entire tapes weren’t played, and on them, he told Wayans that he could have been replaced by Kenan Thompson or Steve Harvey.
He didn’t think he would be fired & replaced: “It’s a little different when you replace Becky or the mom off of Fresh Prince. Like, if they’d replaced the Fresh Prince, we’d have been like, ‘What the f—k are we watching anyway?’ That’s why I just didn’t think it was possible,” he said. He claims the network never called him to tell him he was let go. He learned the news on Twitter.
[From Us Weekly]
“Hollywood is very sensitive, so I should not have screamed and yelled, right, because it’s a bunch of very delicate flowers out there.” Yes, how dare those very delicate flowers would prefer…*checks notes*… to work in an environment which doesn’t include some douchebag with a Napoleon complex screaming at them 24-7? How dare those sensitive souls just want to earn their paychecks by doing their jobs without being harassed by a toxic bro? Basically, Clayne Crawford thought he was the Jesus of Lethal Weapon and he could do whatever he wanted because they would never replace The Star. And Warner Bros was like “we’ll replace you with Seann William Scott and no one will even notice, you arrogant little sh-t.”
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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