Percy Hynes White director defends ‘Wednesday’ actor in wake of sexual assault allegation
The director of a new film starring Wednesday’s Percy Hynes White has defended the actor, following a sexual misconduct allegation against him.
Tiffany Paulsen (Holidate, About Fate) has directed Hynes White in Winter Spring Summer Or Fall, which also stars Hynes White’s Wednesday co-star Jenna Ortega.
The film is set to premiere later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival, and is said to be a romantic drama “loaded with classic tropes” of romcoms, but “with a generous helping of YA fizz”.
Filming on the project was completed in 2022, before the accusation surfaced against Hynes White in January 2023.
The allegations emerged in a since-deleted post on X by an anonymous social media user on January 18, 2023. The poster claimed she had been sexually assaulted by White at a party he was hosting, and accused him of deliberately trying to get women drunk so they would have sex with him.
Hynes White, who played Xavier Thorpe in the Netflix show, later strenuously denied the allegations in an Instagram story, saying the “rumours were false”, describing it as a “campaign of misinformation”. No formal charges were filed against him.
And now, Paulsen has addressed the situation ahead of her film’s premiere. “We do know this is a touchy area and of course, it’s out there, so it would be hard not to discuss it on some level,” she told Forbes.
She said that she was working on post-production on the film when the allegations emerged. “I just said, ‘Keep the noise away from me and I focused on finishing the movie’ and that’s where my focus remained,” she continued. “Getting through the movie and shutting off the noise.”
Paulsen went on to speak about her own experiences working with Hynes White. “To me, it’s a family and I look forward to working with him again,” she said. “I look forward to working with everybody on this movie again.”
“My focus was on my professional relationship with all of my actors and what I can say is he was absolutely lovely and beautiful and prepared, and open and trusting of me. I think his performance, honestly, is transcendent. He’s absolutely magical in this movie.”
In other news, the cast for season two of Wednesday has been announced, with Steve Buscemi and Billie Piper joining the show for the second series. Last year, it was reported that Hynes White had been written out of the season.
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Max Pilley
NME
