Robin Wright Recalls ‘Very Successful’ Director Making Her Cry Early in Career: ‘Doesn’t Like Women’

Robin Wright will never forget an experience with a “very successful” director that left her in tears.

“I’m going to preface it with [it was] a man who really doesn’t like women,” Wright, 59, said during the Wednesday, September 10, episode of the “How to Fail” podcast. “I was very young and shy, and I was traveling in a helicopter with this director out to the middle of a desert in California — I mean, in the middle of a desert, like, nothing around where the set was — to meet a very, very famous actor or two that he was directing.”

Wright claimed she was “ushered into the trailer” to meet the star and recalled being “nervous as hell” for the face-to-face.

“My heart’s palpitating and I’m just sweating. I didn’t know what to say,” the actress recalled. “I thought protocol would be what I was accustomed to, which is when you’re invited in, you are introduced to this new person.”

She claimed there was “no intro” and just “dead silence” in the room.

“I started to feel like it was my responsibility to start the meeting. I was a baby,” she continued. “He yelled at me and said, ‘Speak.’ I got up out of the trailer and I ran out into the desert, started crying.”

She noted that it was over 100 degrees outside when she was crying. The “very established older actor” who was in the trailer was “incredibly kind” to Wright and offered her help.

“He came out and saw me squatting in what little shade I got from one side of the car, and I squatted down and I was crying, and he was like, ‘You’re going to get heat stroke,’” she recalled. “He walked me into the production trailer that was air conditioned and I said, ‘Can somebody just get me a driver to the airport?’ And I got out of there.”

Wright said that, in retrospect, the story “doesn’t sound very bad,” but the “power of it was intense.”

Now that she’s a director, Wright said she would “never” do something like that. (Wright praised her former House of Cards crew for inspiring her to start directing in the same podcast episode.)

“What that does when you’re young and you’re very impressionable is it makes you trigger shy,” she continued. Elsewhere in the episode, Wright added, “That’s why it’s so cool to be older and you feel for the youngins.”