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'The Affair' Showrunner Responds to Report About Ruth Wilson's Exit from the Show

'The Affair' Showrunner Responds to Report About Ruth Wilson's Exit from the Show

Sarah Treem, the showrunner of the Showtime series The Affair, is responding to an article that claimed she created a “hostile work environment” on set, which led to actress Ruth Wilson‘s exit from the show.

THR reported that Ruth left the show due to “ongoing frustrations with the nudity required of her,” and “what she ultimately felt was a hostile work environment,” among issues with Treem.

Sarah has now written an op-ed piece for Deadline in which she reveals years of behind-the-scenes details that shed a light on what was happening on set. In the article, Sarah notes how The Affair is a show “divided into two parts, with each half being told from the very different perspective of characters involved in the same incident.” Ruth‘s character Alison was featured in many sex scenes throughout the season while we followed her affair with the character Noah. Episodes would show scenes from each character’s perspective and while the audience might view a sex scene as a rape in one perspective, the other perspective would sometimes show it was consensual.

When it came time to filming a scene for season two, Ruth “didn’t approve of the scene and didn’t want to play it as written. By this point, it wasn’t a surprise as we had been disagreeing on the character’s choices since the second episode. By now we were at this complicated impasse where I didn’t know how to write the character any differently and she didn’t feel she could play what I was writing.”

Sarah detailed the many times that Ruth didn’t agree with certain scenes and how she either would change the scene or get a body double to film them. She said, “We didn’t agree on the choices of the character or whether or not a sex scene was necessary to advance the plot, but that is not the same thing as not respecting or supporting an actress’s need to feel safe in her work environment, which is something I always take incredibly seriously.”

Click inside to read what Sarah Treem wrote about Ruth Wilson’s exit from the show…

Sarah also opened up about Ruth‘s exit from the series and how Showtime executives told her to write Alison out of the show in season four. She decided that “for a character to disappear, on a show like this, she needed to die. She couldn’t just walk away into the sunset because we followed our characters wherever they went.” Sarah crafted a storyline in which Alison was murdered as part of a domestic violence situation and she had the script approved by the network four times before it went out to the actors.

“But once Ruth’s team reported that she wasn’t happy, they suddenly asked me to change it. At that point, I absolutely fought back because I didn’t want to write a script where a veteran just goes insane and kills a woman with no impetus. If I had known I wouldn’t have been able to follow through on a storyline I had been setting up since the beginning of the season, I would not have made the character of Ben a veteran. To this day, I hate that the storyline seems to suggest that veterans suffering from PTSD are so crazy they might murder women at any point,” Sarah said.

Sarah considered Alison’s death to be a “triumph” as she stands up for herself and refuses to let herself be used.

“I have given my entire professional life to confronting the patriarchy and celebrating women’s narratives through my writing. Yes, I know women can be chauvinists and there is misogyny among women, but that is simply not what happened here,” Sarah wrote. “When I asked for more help at the end of the first season because I was having difficulty being all things to all people and maintaining a creative vision, I was told I simply needed to be ‘more maternal.’ As in many things, it is very tough to be a woman and do this job. I did not always agree with Ruth Wilson, but I did always have respect for her craft, her ability and her process and I tried to write her a character deserving of her immense talent. I know she’ll continue to tell the story of complex, multi-faceted, remarkable female characters for the rest of her long career. I plan on doing the same.”

You can read the full report on Deadline.com.

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Photos: Getty
Posted to: Ruth Wilson, Sarah Treem, The Affair