Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan Split Oscar Campaigns for ‘She Said’

Deadline over the weekend kicked off movie awards season with Contenders Film: New York, a showcase for Big Apple audiences and voters highlighting some of the year’s buzziest movies so far. The event at Manhattan’s The Times Center featured eight films, with casts and creatives joining in for panel discussions about the stories behind their work.

The Good Nurse director Tobias Lindholm and producer Scott Franklin joined Deadline’s Contenders Film: New York awards-season event to talk about their Netflix pic and especially the film’s two Oscar-winning stars: Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.

The stars and creatives of several buzzy films turned out November 5 for Contenders Film: New York, Deadline’s annual daylong awards-season kickoff event. Click through a photo gallery of arrivals above.

Zoe Kazan recalls her research for playing New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor in the film She Said taking on a “mimetic quality” as the real-life similarities accumulated.

It’s that time again, when Deadline decamps to New York City to bring you the latest installment of our Contenders Film series, with the lowdown on some of our favorite Oscar-season possibilities.

The judge at the center of Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles sexual assault trial concluded its first week of hearing testimony by admonishing the jury not to watch the trailer for She Said, the upcoming Universal movie about the events surrounding the New York Times’ investigation of Weinstein that led to its bombshell 2027 exposé and the start of the #MeToo movement.

Last week’s world premiere for She Said in New York has afforded Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan an opportunity to reflect on the task they just undertook, to tell the story behind the story of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s 2017 reporting for the New York Times that first exposed the harrowing abuses of Harvey Weinstein. It was a monumental journalistic achievement, and the impact of their reporting, as well as that of the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow published just a few days later, brought about a seismic shift in industry attitudes to abuse, cracking open a door that survivors of Weinstein and the many other abusers exposed since have been able to step through. Kantor, Twohey and Farrow would go on to share the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting.

One of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault accusers, Ashley Judd, is speaking out on her role in the film "She Said." "She Said," which debuts Nov. 18, highlights the work of journalists who exposed Weinstein in 2017.  Weinstein, 70, is serving a 23-year prison sentence following a conviction in New York. Weinstein, who is on trial in Los Angeles, was granted permission to take his appeal of his 2020 sex crime conviction to the New York State Court of Appeals.

It looks like Carey Mulligan must’ve gotten on a plane right after the New York premiere of her movie She Said!

Antonio Ferme editor In 2017, investigative journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor exposed Harvey Weinstein’s numerous sexual assault scandals and the Hollywood system that enabled him. Five years later, the story behind the influential New York Times report is being told on screen. At the worldwide premiere of “She Said” at the New York Film Festival, director Maria Schrader explained why she believes this story “deserves to be seen on the big screen.” “Hollywood has the duty to tell the really vital stories of our times,” Schrader told Variety on Thursday night. “It’s not about just the wrongdoings of one person but a whole system protecting him. This is something we can find in any kind of industry and even small businesses.”

If and when they choose to speak out about it, survivors of sexual assault each find their own ways of describing their harrowing memories of the incident that victimized them. Going into survival mode, however, is perhaps one experience several would agree on.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan are stepping out for a screening of their new movie at the 2022 New York Film Festival.

Intimacy coordinators, new protocols and safeguards and “things that seem very small on the page” have made Hollywood a better place for women in the MeToo era unleashed by the New York Times’ Oct. 5, 2017 investigation of Harvey Weinstein, said Zoe Kazan, who plays journalist Jodi Kantor in Maria Schrader’s She Said.

If and when they choose to speak out about it, survivors of sexual assault each have their own ways of describing their harrowing memories of the incident that victimized them. Going into survival mode, however, is perhaps one experience several would agree on.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If, like me, you consider “All the President’s Men” to be one of the most exciting movies ever made, it’s remarkable to consider that it came out in 1976, just four years after the Watergate break-in. The saga of Richard Nixon’s corruption and downfall had saturated the culture, yet every moment in “All the President’s Men” tingled with discovery. That’s why it’s a film you can watch again and again. When a big-screen journalistic drama gets built around a news story that epic, it needs to give you a version of that feeling. “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 drama about The Boston Globe’s unraveling of the child sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, wasn’t as great as “All the President’s Men,” yet it, too, was laced with a sense of discovery. It’s there in how the film anatomized not just the horrific behavior of abusive priests but the omertà of the Church.

Maria Schrader’s She Said written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz based on a book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the same name, and starring Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as the two New York Times reporters who uncovered a web of secrets, lies, and abuse revolving around famed Hollywood producer (and now convicted felon), Harvey Weinstein.

Clayton Davis Reputations go a long way in Hollywood, and when you’re seeking Oscar attention, a good one provides a significant edge against the competition. While more than a few contenders in this year’s mix have had previous run-ins with colleagues and journalists, those without that baggage have social media, and the industry, rooting for them. At the top of the list is Brendan Fraser, one of the best comeback stories in years. In Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale” (Aronofsky and Fraser are both on the cover of this week’s New York issue of Variety) where he plays a 600-pound man looking to reconnect with his daughter, he delivers an astounding performance. The adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play may face an uphill battle in other major categories, based on reactions so far. However, the star of “The Mummy” (1999) and “Encino Man” (1992) has been able to rise above any criticism, especially after Variety posted a viral video of him getting emotional during the film’s standing ovation at Venice.