German actress Diane Kruger once walked out of an audition because of a ‘disrespectful’ director.
The Inglourious Basterds star had to learn 15 pages of dialogue for the audition but although she came prepared to read for the part, the meeting with the unnamed director went awry early on.
“It was a really long monologue with difficult lines,” Kruger tells actress Hong Chau in an interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors. “The audition was in this hotel and there are, like, 10 people in the room. I start the monologue and his cell phone starts ringing in the middle of it. It rings twice or three times and (he) picks it up. He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’. He just looks at it and goes, ‘Start again’.”
Kruger attempted to complete the monologue a few more times, but the filmmaker kept interrupting her. Eventually she just walked out.
“He literally was making dinner plans,” she says. “Then he said, ‘OK, go ahead. Sorry. Start again’. I did. And the phone rang again. I didn’t even let him answer it. I just got my stuff and left. That’s so disrespectful, right? Screw him. That was my worst auditioning experience.”
