“I’ll stop acting if the industry doesn’t change”

Maryam Hassouni will no longer act in movies and TV series as long as “the industry doesn’t want to change”. This is what the 37-year-old actress said on the BNNVARA program Khalid and Sophiewhere she was a guest to talk about her book Look at the fake. In it, she exposes to the world, among other things, transgressive behavior in the world of theater and cinema.

Hassouni, who broke through at 15 with the role of Dunya in the TV series Dunya and Desieshe writes in her book that she herself has had to deal with sexually transgressive behavior and racism several times in her career.

It started when he was 19, he explained Khalid and Sophie. During the hiatus of a rehearsal day for a play, the actress was pinched by her director in her buttocks, after which he pressed her genitals against her. After intermission, she was asked to practice a kissing scene with the guy who played her brother in the play. “We really had to do it for twenty or thirty minutes,” she said. “It took a long time.”

Hassouni immediately reported the incident to his agent. He called her the next day: she had talked to the producer and he had made it clear that Hassouni was no longer welcome on set. “I was blacklisted,” the actress said. “That meant: I would never be asked by that production house again and I wouldn’t be paid for my work.”

The theater incident is not an isolated incident, Hassouni clarifies in his book. He writes about bullying, intimidation and transgressive behavior in his later career, including on the set of a TV series that is still ongoing.

For example, she was sent an unsolicited explicit porn video from a male opponent and says she is regularly referred to as “the black hole”. A director once told her: “I want to look inside men’s heads, women’s bottoms.”

Hassouni, the first Dutch actress ever to win a prestigious Emmy, deliberately does not mention names in her book, not even of plays or series. “It’s not Cluedo, I didn’t write a detective,” she told her to Khalid and Sophie.

He prefers to talk about a confession or a testimony. Hassouni: “A coming of age about a woman in the making in a racist and sexist system. Messages about transgressive behavior often refer to the offender. I overturned it. “

Cross-border behavior in the cultural sector is a persistent problem, the Culture Council concluded this year in a report. According to the Council, employees in the culture and media sector are particularly vulnerable, partly due to the performance culture in the industry and because physical contact is sometimes part of the job. Unequal power relations also play a role.

People who have experienced unwanted behavior in the cultural sector can contact the Mores hotline. More reports have been received so far this year than last year. Including the BOOS– broadcast around The voice in January it stirred things up a lot.