Leader Of The Pack

Long before the #MeToo movement was ignited, actress Olivia Munn exposed the sexual misconduct of some of Hollywood’s biggest power players. Here, she explains how it’s a move that almost cost her her career – and why you should never write off an underdog

- Shoshana Goldberg

Olivia Munn is used to being the underdog.

She knows how it feels to be alone, fighting against a world that does not want your voice in it. She first learned this when she was 13 years old. A marauding group of teenage girls would single her out at school. They would laugh at her clothes, tell her she looked stupid, push her, one after the other, before menacingly telling her they wanted her “out of our school”. One day Olivia saw her older sister, Sara – a popular girl at the same school – being approached by the bullies. She watched from the sidelines, hopeful that her sibling would deliver a cutting coup de grace. Instead she did nothing.

“So I raced after her and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell them off?’ And she simply said, ‘They don’t matter.’” Then she came up close to her younger sister’s face and breathed the words, “[And] if you ever let these girls make you feel small [again], I’ll kick your ass myself.”

The next time Olivia saw the bullies, something inside her had changed. One of the girls called her a “slut”, despite Munn only being in the eighth grade and never having kissed a boy. For the first time, she spoke up. She told them what she thought of them. As the words tumbled out of her mouth, the girls walked towards her. With the threat of violence on the horizon, Munn said, “OK, fine, let’s go. But you have to throw the first punch because I don’t want to get expelled. If you throw the first punch, we can start.” They were confused. And so Olivia Munn did the only sensible thing she could think of: she picked up her stuff and walked away.

It has been a metaphor for her life ever since.