Butter rape revelation sparks Hollywood outrage

“Last Tango in Paris” is making headlines again 44 years after the controversial film came out. A recently unearthed video interview with Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci from 2013 has renewed interest, and outrage, over what happened to French actress Maria Schneider on set during the infamous butter rape scene.

Bertolucci said that neither he nor Marlon Brando told Schneider of their plans to use the stick of butter during the simulated rape scene — a concept they came up with the morning of the shoot — because he wanted her to react “as a girl, not as an actress.” He wanted her, he said, to feel “the rage and the humiliation.”

“We were having, with Marlon, breakfast on the floor of the flat where I was shooting,” Bertolucci recounted. “There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted.”

“I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on,” he added.

Schneider, who died in 2011 at age 58 after a lengthy illness, spoke a number of times about the scene between her, then aged 19, and Marlon Brando, then 48, even saying in a 2007 Daily Mail interview that she “felt a little raped” by her co-star and director.

“They only told me about it before we had to film the scene, and I was so angry,” Schneider said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script. But at the time, I didn’t know that.” 

In the contentious scene, Brando’s middle-aged character Paul sexually assaults Maria’s youthful persona Jeanne using a stick of butter as lubricant.

“Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”

But despite Schneider’s past comments, the video interview with Bertolucci struck a chord this weekend as it circulated on social media that the director was admitting that the scene in the 1972 film was non-consensual.

Actress Jessica Chastain wrote on Twitter that she felt “sick” over the revelation that “the director planned her attack.”

“To all the people that love this film – you’re watching a 19-year-old get raped by a 48-year-old man,” wrote Chastain.

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay called it inexcusable. “As a director, I can barely fathom this. As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it,” DuVernay wrote.

Chris Evans also expressed his rage and said it was “beyond disgusting.”

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. I feel rage,” Evans writes on his profile, before calling for prosecution: “They should be in jail.”

Anna Kendrick weighed in that she “used to get eye-rolls” when she brought the incident up to people previously and that she was “glad at least it will be taken seriously now.”

Actress Evan Rachel Wood, who recently opened up about her own rape terror in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, agrees with her peers, tweeting: “I second that. This is heartbreaking and outrageous. The two of them are very sick individuals to think that was okay.”

Some, like actress Jenna Fischer, took a more extreme stance, writing that “all copies of this film should be destroyed immediately.”

Schneider, a relative unknown when she was cast in the film, said that the “whole circus” of suddenly being famous made her turn to drugs and she even attempted suicide a few times. She stayed friends with Brando until his death in 2004, but she said that “for a while we couldn’t talk about the movie.”

Bertolucci, however, did not maintain a relationship with Schneider. He said he knew she hated him for life in that interview two years after her death. And while he doesn’t regret the scene, he said he does feel guilty about it.