Olivia Munn says male costar refused to be saved in movie bunker scene

Olivia Munn is calling out a male costar for “obnoxious” behavior on set.

The “Your Friends & Neighbors” star, 45, revealed in an appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show” on April 8 that she once worked with an actor who shut down filming for almost an hour because he refused to be saved by her character during an action sequence.

“I was in this bunker once, and if you read the script, it was that he was guarding his side, I was guarding my side, then we switch sides, and then there’s a guy that was coming for him that was going to shoot him in the back, so I shoot him,” Munn recalled. “We’re about to shoot [the scene], and somehow, I guess he didn’t read the script, and in that moment, he realized, ‘Wait, wait, wait, hold on. She can’t save me.'”

She continued, “Everything stops down, and there was no insecurity about being obnoxious and everyone hearing this, and being like, ‘She can’t save me! We’re not doing this!'”

Munn said the actor was also “combative” with the director, and this ultimately halted filming for about 45 minutes. According to the “X-Men: Apocalypse” star, she resolved the issue by suggesting the scene could be that “instead of my character saving you, it just is that we switch because it’s time for us to switch, and so this is my guy to get.” This placated the actor and made him fine with filming, Munn said, despite the fact that “nothing changed” with the scene in a practical sense.

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“It’s just what he thought. I was doing the exact same thing,” Munn said, drawing applause from Barrymore’s studio audience.

Munn did not name the actor or the project. The “Newsroom” star shared the story after reflecting on how she decided early in her career that she didn’t want to play female characters who simply exist in service of a male character.

Munn has spoken out about her bad experiences working in Hollywood in the past. In 2025, she revealed on the “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky” podcast that she refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement after working on a movie where something “so traumatic” happened that she “had to file complaints with the studio.” Munn did not name the film or detail what happened.

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“I was offered a lot of money, seven figures, to accept their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it, but it came along with an NDA,” she said. “Not that I would ever have talked about it, truly, because I wanted to move past it all, and that’s why I don’t want to talk about the specific things that happened in that situation. But I said, ‘I’m not signing an NDA.'”