Andie McDowell revealed to Marie Claire that she suffered a panic attack on a set in 2016 after noticing the production was populated entirely by male cast and crew. The actor was the only woman on set at the time. McDowell said the panic attack occurred shortly after Donald Trump got elected president, which didn’t help her emotional state on set.
“I had this kind of crazy experience, right after Trump got elected,” McDowell said. “I was really disturbed that nobody seemed to care about the vagina[-grabbing] comment; I had gotten really sad. I went to do a job, a day’s work, and I had my very first panic attack. I was getting ready to shoot something, and I turn around and it’s, like, a roomful of men. Like, a sea of men. It flashed on something that was personal for me. And I dropped to my knees.”
McDowell continued, “I left the room, and went into this fake bathroom on the set, and looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘Get your shit together.’ It just freaked me out, not seeing any other women. It’s not that I have anything against men. I don’t! I just don’t like big groups of them. Since then, I’ve become very conscious of looking around and finding the women on set. For comfort.”
The #MeToo ignited a year later in the fall of 2017, and since then McDowell has said “you do see the difference on set. There are a lot more women.”
McDowell earned acclaim last year for her supporting role opposite daughter Margaret Qualley in Netflix’s limited series “Maid,” for which she is in the running for an Emmy nomination. Most recently, McDowell re-teamed with the streaming giant for the original movie “Along for the Ride,” which hit streaming May 6. Next up for McDowell is a roll opposite in Orlando Bloom in the thriller “Red Right Hand.”
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