Matthew Lawrence says his agency dropped him for rejecting the advances of a famous director

He also says the #MeToo movement has been good, but not enough men have come forward with their own experiences

By Sam Barsanti | April 30, 2023 | 10:37pm

Aux News Matthew Lawrence

Matthew Lawrence says his agency dropped him for rejecting the advances of a famous director

The Lawrence brothers in 2017 Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez

On the most recent episode of the Brotherly Love podcast he hosts with his brothers (via Variety), Matthew Lawrence claimed that his career was negatively impacted after he was sexually harassed by an unnamed “award-winning director.” Lawrence said there have been “many times” where he was “propositioned to get a huge role,” including this instance where a director invited him to a hotel room and “showed up in his robe” and asked Lawrence to take his clothes off, saying, “he needed to take Polaroids of me and said if I did X, Y, and Z, I would be the next Marvel character.” (Without knowing who he’s talking about, we have no way of knowing if this was an actual thing the director could do, which is to say that we don’t know if this director really had any involvement with any sort of Marvel project.)

Lawrence said he left the hotel room after that, and that his acting agency (which he also did not name) fired him because of it. He also discussed his experience in relation to the larger #MeToo movement, saying it has been a “very good thing” for the entertainment industry, but that he doesn’t think enough men have come forward to talk about their sexual harassment experiences in this business.

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“Not a lot of guys in my opinion have come out and talked about this in the industry,” he suggested, adding that not only are women more likely to be sexually harassed than men, but that people in general are also more comfortable hearing about women being sexually harassed. “It’s probably about a third of what women go through,” Lawrence noted, but “men go through this as well” and that “our society is less ready to hear that situation is going on with men than they are with women.”