Olivia Munn recounted a time when a male co-star stopped filming for three-quarters of an hour because her character was scripted to rescue him. The actor, whom she did not name, refused to continue once he understood the sequence undermined his preferred image of masculine self-reliance.

Olivia Munn details why one of her male co-stars halted production

Speaking on The Drew Barrymore Show, Olivia Munn laid out the scene’s mechanics. It was a bunker shootout. She and her co-star were covering opposite angles before rotating positions. While his back was turned, an enemy came up, and Munn’s character was written to fire the life-saving shot.

The problem surfaced immediately. “If you read the script, it was that he was guarding his side, I was guarding my side, then we switch sides and then there’s a guy that was coming for him — was gonna shoot him in the back — so I shoot him,” Munn shared. Her co-star apparently missed that detail during preparation. When it clicked on set, he shouted, “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. She can’t save me. No, no. She can’t save me.”

The protest was loud and public. Munn then shared that he argued with the director and showed zero self-consciousness about the disruption. “There was no insecurity about being obnoxious and everyone hearing this and being like, ‘She can’t save me! We’re not doing this!'”

Production idled for roughly 45 minutes while the crew waited. Munn ultimately proposed a fix that altered the phrasing rather than the physics of the scene. ” I said, ‘Okay, how about instead of my character saving you, it’s just is that we switch because it’s time for us to switch and so this is my guy to get,'” she recalled. He accepted the revision.

The resolution was cosmetic. “Now here’s the interesting thing: nothing changed. It’s just what he thought,” Munn told the audience. She fired the same weapon at the same target, but reframing the action as a tactical switch instead of a rescue satisfied the actor’s ego.

This is not the first time Olivia Munn has navigated difficult dynamics with colleagues.