Leslie Jones recounts unfair pay, death threats, and more from Ghostbusters

Leslie Jones is set to tackle the controversial 2016 Ghostbusters in her new memoir Leslie F*cking Jones. In an excerpt published by Rolling Stone, Jones reflects on the incredible amount of bullying she endured in the wake of the reboot—a film for which she says she wasn’t even offered a fair salary. According to Jones, she was first offered a meager $67,000 and had to fight for a total of $150,000, still less than her co-stars Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. “[The] message was clear: ‘This is gonna blow you up—after this, you’re made for life,’ all that kind of shit, as though I hadn’t had decades of a successful career already,” Jones writes. “And in the end, all it made for me was heartache and one big-ass controversy.”

As for that big-ass controversy: “Of all the women in Paul’s remake of the movie, I was the one who got taken through the ringer. I wonder why… Oh, right, because I was a Black girl,” the Saturday Night Live alum notes. “I was being sent films of being hanged, of white guys jacking off on my picture, saying, ‘You fucking n****r. We going to kill you.’ Why are people being so evil to each other? How can you sit and type ‘I want to kill you.’ Who does that?”

Jones’ social media was under such constant threat of hacking that then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey personally interceded. It “was basically the start of Twitter taking this shit more seriously,” Jones claims. She endured vitriol and death threats over the comedy, only for Ghostbusters: Afterlife director Jason Reitman to make the “unforgivable” comment that he was giving Ghostbusters “back to the fans” with his version. “Bringing up the idea of giving the movie ‘back to the fans’ was a pretty clear shout-out to all those losers who went after us for making an all-female film,” Jones writes.

There were positives to the film, like bonding with and learning from Kate McKinnon, McCarthy, Wiig, and director Paul Feig, as well as working with the “fucking incredible” crew. “That crew deserved for y’all to see the movie we actually made. But a lot of stuff got cut for cost,” she reveals.

What was left on the cutting room floor? Character moments between Jones and McKinnon as well as McCarthy and Wiig, a lot of improv, one of her fight scenes, and a whole dance sequence for Chris Hemsworth’s character choreographed by the late Michael K. Williams. “It was like a really funny, weird version of ‘Thriller,’” she writes. “The day of that taping we were so excited because we figured that when people saw this, they were going to lose it.”

Instead, it was cut. “The reason given was that the special effects needed were too expensive, or some bullshit. But if this film can’t afford special effects, then what the fuck are we doing making a Ghostbusters movie in the first place?” Jones wonders. “If they had released the movie as we’d shot it, I swear things would have been different.” You can read the full excerpt here, or check out the book, which was published this week.