It’s never been easy to be a young actress (or an actress of any age) in Hollywood. We’ve heard so many stories of women posing for magazines like Playboy and Maxim—often at the behest of male producers or publicists—and then being punished by those same executives shortly after. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that actresses have been talking about more frequently.
“At the time, I thought this was the worst day of my life,” Hart said on the podcast in response to being shown a photo of herself and Britney Spears where she said, if you looked in her eyes, you could tell “I’d been crying all evening.” The actress then went on to explain that she was doing press for her ‘90s rom-com Drive My Crazy all while reeling from a very recent breakup, when she got a call on her limo phone (!) that she had been fired from Scary Movie, which she was actively heading to go shoot in Canada.
As if all that wasn’t enough of a roller-coaster for the then 23-year-old actress, she went on to reveal that she received another devastating reality check at a party later that night (where the photo with Spears was taken). “My lawyer shows up and goes, ‘You did a photo shoot for Maxim magazine?’” she said. “I’m like: ‘Yes, I did.’ They’re like, ‘Well, you’re being sued and fired from your show, so don’t talk to the press, don’t do anything.’”
Hart soon got a “phone call on my cell phone from my mother, my producer, who was like, ‘What did you do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, whatever my publicist told me to do at the photo shoot. Like I did a photo shoot for Maxim! It’s Maxim, of course you’re gonna be in your underwear.’”
While Hart says the main takeaway in “top headlines” was “Can Melissa be sexy? She’s 23"—a line of thinking likely taken by Sabrina’s producers as well—the only thing they could actually (attempt) to get her on was a line in her contract that stated she “would never play the character [Sabrina] naked.” On the cover, Hart was credited as “Sabrina, your favorite witch without a stitch.”
After arguing that she had no control over what went on the cover, Hart said that she wrote an apology letter and the whole thing eventually went away, although it took “weeks and weeks.” While it seems like it all worked out in the end, this is obviously a scandal that never should have happened in the first place.
