Mia Farrow Gets Why Actors Still Want to Work With Woody Allen

Over the past few years, a number of actors have expressed their regrets about working with Woody Allen, including Greta Gerwig, Kate Winslet, and Timothée Chalamet. But for those actors who still want to appear in the 88-year-old director’s films? Mia Farrow totally gets it.

“I completely understand if an actor decides to work with him,” Farrow told CBS Sunday Morning. “I’m not one who’d say, ‘Oh, they shouldn’t.’” Farrow, who collaborated with Allen on 13 movies over the course of decades, also says she can separate her experiences on those films from the family turmoil that came afterward. “Oh yeah, yeah.” 

Farrow’s latest comments are surprising given the former couple’s history. Farrow and Allen adopted two children together, Dylan and Moses. In the early 1990s, Farrow accused Allen of molesting Dylan. However, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Child Welfare Agency of the State Department of Social Services both concluded that the charges were “unfounded.” Allen has always vehemently denied the allegations.

Dylan restated the claims in an open letter to The New York Times in 2014. To add to the confusion, Moses published his own account strongly denying Dylan’s abuse claims in 2018, instead accusing Farrow of emotional abuse and physical attacks on his siblings.

Despite Farrow’s contention that she understands the desire of actors to work with Allen, many have shunned his films in recent years. Allen’s latest, the French-language Coup de Chance, stars European actors from a continent where the director’s reputation isn’t as tarnished. And again, several of Allen’s most recent American stars have expressed their regrets about working with him. “Honestly, (acting in Crisis in Six Scenes, 2016) is the decision that I have made in my life that is the most inconsistent with everything I stand for and believe in, both publicly and privately,” Rachel Brosnihan told The Hollywood Reporter. 

Gerwig appeared in Allen’s 2012 comedy, To Rome With Love. “If I had known then what I know now, I would not have acted in the film,” Gerwig said in her 2018 op-ed for The New York Times. “I have not worked for him again, and I will not work for him again.”

“What the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?” wondered Kate Winslet to Vanity Fair in 2020. (Winslet co-starred in Allen’s Wonder Wheel in 2017.) “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful. And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both.”