Twenty-five years ago, says Jennifer Esposito, a producer almost ended her career. She's now channeling her anger into her directorial debut.
The “Blue Bloods” star had just been “catapulted into Hollywood” after her role in Spike Lee's 1999 thriller “Summer of Sam,” she said last week at the “She Spins” Podcast. Then, a week after filming a new movie, the producer, whom Esposito did not name, fired her “for no reason.”
“He was a notorious and brutal producer, a Harvey Weinstein type person. He literally had the power and he used it to completely end the career of a 26-year-old girl,” he said.
This producer allegedly discouraged everyone she knew from hiring her, falsely claiming she was a drug addict who had locked herself in a trailer on set. “It never happened,” Esposito said.
She also believes he killed her chances of starring in “Charlie's Angels” after she had already received an offer.
Esposito's agency knew of the producer's actions, he said, but did not intervene because of his high profile and connections to the industry. Finally, the young actor's team abandoned her and she remained without representation for two and a half years.
“That was a really painful moment,” Esposito said, for a “little girl who had this dream since she was a baby.”
“But it was also a beautiful moment, because if I wasn't that girl, I would never have been this woman. she would never have written [sic] and I directed what I just did because, as I told some people who know me well, 'Fresh Kills,' my movie, was for the 26-year-old kid who was massacred.”
“Fresh Kills,” which premiered Friday, is Esposito’s feature-length directorial debut. A feminist take on the classic mafia film, following the wives, daughters and sisters of the men who run an organized crime family. Co-starring alongside Esposito are Emily Bader, Odessa A'zion, Domenick Lombardozzi and Annabella Sciorra, also a “Blue Bloods” alum.
The film is personal for Esposito, he said, as it is set in the 1980s on Staten Island, the borough where he grew up.
“I saw a lot of violence when I was a child; It was just a tough neighborhood and a big mafia community,” she said. “I always thought, 'Why are they so angry?'
“But as I moved forward in my life and started to pursue my career,” he continued, “that anger and rage that I saw started to feel very familiar to me.”
Not many people believed in “Fresh Kills” from the beginning, Esposito told KTLA, and several offered him money to stop directing it. “They offered me $5 million if a man directed it instead of me. “They offered me a lot of money to make stars appear.”
But she stood her ground and mortgaged her house to finance the project, and it seems to have paid off.
“Fresh Kills” premiered a year ago at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and has since won several awards on the festival circuit. One review said it “stands alongside the best post-'The Godfather' gangster movies.”
“These characters move people, men and women, in ways that to me are very beautiful,” Esposito said during her “She Pivots” episode. “To me, that's always what art is supposed to be.”
