A FATAL FEUD
Jasmine McKenna: The press weren’t particularly kind to Nadine at that time.
Kayla Alexander: Like, what was she expecting? If you don’t want the headlines to drag you for being a burned-up druggie don’t do drugs? It’s that easy.
Clips roll of TV anchors tearing into Nadine, flashing those pictures onto the screen as they discuss what sort of impact this will have on the youth of America, on how disappointed they all are by their icon and pondering whether the Academy will rescind its award.
They finish with commiserations for her loss.
Ivan Drozdov: Nadine fought for her recovery. I can’t even imagine the strength that took.
Nadine Heywood: I finished the program at the end of June.
But I was using the drugs to self-medicate and the things I was using them for, well, that’s going to take time.
Now I had other ways to work through it.
And one of those was work—I needed to be back on a set, but casting directors weren’t exactly queueing at my door.
Harper helped—she got in touch with roles she couldn’t fit into her schedule and put my name forward for opportunities.
I resented her for it—what I perceived as pity.
I was so relieved when my break came from a source other than her.
Jasmine McKenna: It was something we wrestled with.
We’d obliterated Nadine in the press, but we wanted more headlines.
We didn’t want her to stop being relevant.
So there were huge swaths of people behind the scenes suddenly rooting for her because no one wanted their consistent headline seller to vanish into obscurity.
Nadine Heywood: Penelope Lutz had an actress drop out of her upcoming film In Your Own Way due to scheduling conflicts, and there I was with my schedule wide open.
In September, I won a Tony for Hedda Gabler.
Which shocked me as much as it did everyone else.
And then Rigged hit television screens and was being warmly received.
All this to say, I suppose, that the ground beneath me may have been shaky, but I had landed on my feet.
Jasmine McKenna: Somehow, Nadine had achieved the impossible and looked to be clawing her way back in. Then we cut to Cannes. And it’s such an escalation of what we’d seen before. Harper attacking Nadine? I honestly still can’t believe it.
Nadine fidgets with her microphone and looks down, taking a breath. When she looks back up, her eyes lock onto the camera.
Nadine Heywood: Harper didn’t attack me. I told you, the ground beneath me was shaky. That wasn’t enough for me. I knew the easiest way to fix everything was to rekindle the feud and to make Harper undeniably its villain. So I made up a story.