A recent Ride Responsibly PSA you released drew a line between the dangers of ride-hailing apps and the #MeToo movement. What was the thought process behind that ad?
It was happening at the time when we were putting the commercial together, and we thought it was really, really important to draw attention to this movement, and how this is part of it. It’s also about taking the initiative of preventing these things from happening to yourself, and I’ve been saying this a lot in different places and it hasn’t been received that well because people perceive that I’m victim-blaming—and I’m not. I’m just a girl who had a great mom who taught me to protect myself in a given situation, and I think that’s what we need to do. We need to not have this false sense of security that these things are safe—and also when it comes to going to a hotel. So we have to take preventative measures, and it’s not victim-blaming, because obviously the perpetrator is always at fault, but we have to be more vigilant about protecting ourselves.
One of the things that’s being corrected by the #MeToo movement is the insidious casting-couch culture in Hollywood, which has been around since its inception. It’s disgusting that it had been reduced to a cliché, the “casting couch.” I know you’ve spoken about a creepy incident with Steven Seagal while auditioning for Under Siege.
Right. It had been accepted as part of the culture. I’ve had a lot of creepy moments, but I got out of there fast [with Seagal]. No job is worth disrespecting yourself. I’ve been offered many campaigns and “private auditions” and they didn’t make sense to me. I thought, this doesn’t mean that much to me, and this is not how I’m going to do it. I’m not that ambitious.
Are there any incidents—besides the one with Seagal—that stick out for you in Hollywood, where your alarm bells were really going off and you thought, “I gotta get out of here?”
So many. And the thing is, people like to think that the Playboy Mansion was a sleazy place, but it was so elegant and chic and people were very respectful to each other—probably because going there they knew that it was this freer kind of environment. The women were beautiful and fun, there were artists, and it was this crazy, fun, wild time, but it was very respectful. It wasn’t creepy. Lots of things happened at the Playboy Mansion but it was all consensual.
You’ve been an activist for quite some time now, and I believe it began with PETA and fighting for animal rights.
My beginning as an activist was to defend animals. Since I was little I was always protecting animals in my neighborhood—I was always protected the three-legged dog, or a bird with a broken wing, and I had a cat that walked sideways. All the misfits. I just always felt an affinity with them. Then my father was hunting and I didn’t really put it together what that was, and then when I was about seven, I found a dead deer hanging upside down with no head in the backyard and I realized that was meat. Even my father said he was just doing it out of habit with his friends, where they’d have a beer and go hunting and kill a deer, and he’d never looked at it through the eyes of a child, and how traumatic that could be. So he stopped hunting immediately. I wasn’t having that. [Laughs]
I’ve lived in the woods and on the ocean, which gave me a great respect for the environment. And then with socialism and politics, and Canada versus America, and health care, everything that I learned I applied to my life and my cause, and then I met Julian [Assange] and got involved with the Courage Foundation. I recently started a new foundation called Activist Tenure—an extension of my foundation which I think is the most important thing that I’ve done and the most important thing that I will do. It’s based on academic tenure, so we pick ten activists a year and we pay their salary. These are career activists, so if they’re being harassed by governments or the law they have money to defend themselves. We need these people to be active. Paul Watson, Julian [Assange] and Vivienne [Westwood] are on the board.
You met Julian through Vivienne, right? How did that happen?
Yes. You know, it was really funny because I write a lot of poetry and I put Julian in one of my poems. I don’t even remember if I published it, but somehow he heard about it and read it, and he was talking to Vivienne and wanted to meet me—and I wanted to meet him. So I finally went in [to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London] and it was a funny conversation, because he was like, “Why am I in this? Why do you know me? How do you know me?” And I said, well, I wanted to ask your advice: I want to know how to be more effective as an activist—because I do believe he’s one of the leaders of the free world who’s very beloved and admired by young people, mostly. Information is happening so fast and is so rapidly moving that we need someone like Julian to help us understand and make sense of it all, and I don’t understand why he’s the enemy.
So that first meeting it’s you, Julian and Vivienne at the embassy?
No, it was just Julian and I—because I came on the wrong day… or she said the wrong day. We don’t know who made the mistake! So I went to the embassy, buzzed the buzzer, said who I was, and we had this long conversation. There were a lot of people in the room and then slowly it was just him and I. Then I came a few months later and started bringing him vegan food and made sure he was exercising, because I was worried about his health—his skin was transparent. I learned a lot about him and we have a lot of mutual friends, so it’s nice to keep his spirits up. And he is a testimony to the human spirit. He’s been in a small room for six years and now he’s being squeezed—his internet’s been taken away, he can’t have visitors, he can’t have phone calls. If I’m curious about what Julian’s going through, I follow Julian’s mother, Christine, online. She’s fantastic and talks about him as a curious young boy.
With Julian, I heard that you’d reached out to Kanye West to try to get in Trump’s ear about possibly pardoning Julian.
Yeah. Well you know, I try to think about my friendships—and my friends who have a lot of access to people—and I look at them and wonder why they’re not doing more. So I reached out to [Kanye] and I also gave Kim [Kardashian] a fake fur coat, and she’s sworn off fur, which is great. I’ve known Kim and Kanye for a long time. I don’t really see them too much, but with Kanye, I don’t know, I think he’s a really interesting guy. His thing is his thing and he’s very unique. We need more unique figures.
Do you think that message is actually gonna get passed along to Trump?
Ah, who knows. I saw Alec Baldwin the other day at Match Game and asked him, “How do you get along with Trump?” and he’s like, “Ah, not great.” I said, “Well, if you get Julian a pardon maybe he could host Saturday Night Live!”—because Julian is really funny and not a lot of people know that.
