LOS ANGELES — Twenty-five years ago, Jennifer Esposito says, a producer nearly ended her career. Now she’s channeling her anger into her directorial debut.
The “Blue Bloods” star had just been “catapulted to Hollywood” after her role in Spike Lee’s 1999 thriller “Summer of Sam,” she said last week on the “She Pivots” podcast. Then, a week into filming a new movie, the producer — whom Esposito left unnamed — fired her “for no reason.”
“This was a notorious, brutal producer, a Harvey Weinstein-esque type of person. He literally had the power and used it to completely end a young girl’s career at 26 years old,” she said.
This producer allegedly discouraged everyone he knew from hiring her, falsely claiming she was a drug addict who had locked herself in a trailer on set. “Never happened,” Esposito said.
She also believes he killed her chances to star in “Charlie’s Angels” after she had already received an offer.
Esposito’s agency knew of the producer’s actions, she said, but didn’t intervene because of his high profile and industry connections. Eventually, the young actor’s team dropped her, and she was left without representation for two-and-a-half years.
“That was a really, really painful time,” Esposito said, for a “kid who had this dream since she was a baby.”
“But it was also a beautiful time, because if I wasn’t that kid, I would have never been this woman. I would never have wrote [sic] and directed what I just did, because, as I’ve said to a few people that know me well, ‘Fresh Kills,’ my film, was for the 26-year-old kid who got slaughtered.”
“Fresh Kills,” which came out June 14, is Esposito’s feature-film directorial debut. A feminist twist on the classic mob movie, it follows 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 to Esposito, she said, as it’s set in 1980s Staten Island — the borough where she grew up.
“I saw a lot of violence as a kid — it was just a tough neighborhood and a lot of big mafia community,” she said. “I just always thought, ‘Why are they so angry?’
“But as I went through my life and I started to go into my career,” she continued, “that anger and that 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 her money to step away from directing it. “I was offered $5 million if a male would direct it instead of myself. I was offered a lot of money for stars to be in it.”
But she stuck to her guns, mortgaging 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 garnered several awards on the festival circuit. One review said it “stands tall alongside the best post-’Godfather’ gangster movies.”
“These characters are touching people, male and female, in ways that are so beautiful to me,” Esposito said during her “She Pivots” episode. “To me, that’s always what art is supposed to be.”
