Christina Ricci: I Was Threatened With Lawsuit After Objecting to a Sex Scene

On Wednesday’s episode of The View, during a conversation about how performers have gradually acquired more agency over their sex scenes in Hollywood, actress Christina Ricci shared that earlier in her career she was threatened with legal action because she expressed discomfort with the particulars of one such scene.

Asked by host Sarah Haines about the differences between her own experience and what she had observed watching younger actresses at work, Ricci said, “It’s really great. Us older ladies talk about it all the time. It’s amazing to see that they don’t necessarily have to go through the things we had to go through.”

“They’re able to say, ‘I don’t want to do this sex scene,’ ‘I’m not going to be naked,’” the Yellowjackets star continued. “They can set boundaries for themselves that we were never allowed to do.”

“Someone threatened to sue me once because I didn’t want to do this sex scene in a certain way,” Ricci added, without naming the project. “It’s really changed and it’s great to see.”

Wednesday was not the first time Ricci publicly recounted the experience of being threatened with the lawsuit, telling Sydney Sweeney in an Actors on Actors conversation for Variety last June, “That would never happen now.”

“What? Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Sweeney responded.

“It was fine. I didn’t do it anyway. And they didn’t sue me,” Ricci said.

Ricci made her film debut at the age of nine and became a household name starring as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family a year later. She cemented her name as a teen idol with projects like Casper, Now and Then, and Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain.

Now 43 years old, and with a slew of other film and television projects under her belt, Ricci said on The View that she saw Yellowjackets as “one of the most incredible experiences” of her career.

In her Variety conversation, she told Sweeney that starting work on the Showtime series in 2019 was “the first time” she realized how much the industry had pivoted to view performers’ consent and agency in a different light.

“With the conversations that were had on our set about intimacy and people’s comfort, it was the first time I realized that things have really changed,” she said, “and women are now allowed to say, ‘I’m not comfortable.’”

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