Here's what the cast of the Harvey Weinstein drama 'She Said' looks like in real life

Academy Award-nominee Carey Mulligan played Megan Twohey, one of the two New York Times investigative reporters who broke the story of the sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein and co-authored the book that inspired the movie.

At The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Gala earlier this month, Mulligan said she owed Twohey and fellow Times reporter Jodie Kantor an "immense debt" for their reporting.

"I think I'd talk to my children differently. I think I'd enter work negotiations differently. I think I would walk down the street differently," Mulligan said. "Because the story they broke wasn't about one man. They were interested in systems that uphold and have upheld that behavior for millennia. And the story that broke, broke the dam and has begun the work to dismantle that system."

Zoe Kazan portrayed New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor, who broke the Weinstein story alongside Twohey.

During The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Gala, Kantor described the resistance she and Twohey faced while reporting on the Weinstein scandal, saying they were met with "condescending lectures" from a number of powerful figures in Hollywood.

"They told us sexual harassment was just an unfortunate fact of the entertainment industry — and the workplace," Kantor said. "That even if we got the story, we were naive to think anyone would care."

Twohey added: "There's no knowing how much other people might care about your story until you tell it."

Patricia Clarkson played New York Times' investigations editor Rebecca Corbett, who oversaw the Weinstein investigation and helped guide and edit Twohey and Kantor's bombshell report.

The Times reporters looked to Corbett, who joined The Times in 2004, as "our true north," they said in an interview with Elle Magazine in 2019, describing the revered editor as "sixty-something, skeptical, scrupulous, and allergic to flashiness or exaggeration."

When asked about the report catalyzing the cultural shift against sexual violence and the subsequent #MeToo movement, Corbett told Elle: "I think that the real bottom line is that women were fed up, that women around the world in various cultures all had some experience of this and wanted to speak out about it and felt that this was an opening."

Andre Braugher played Dean Baquet, who served as the executive editor of The Times from May 2014 to June 2022.

The "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" actor said in an interview with Vanity Fair in November that he didn't meet Baquet prior to portraying him in the biopic drama, nor did he have a lot of information on him as a person. Instead, Braugher said he emulated the former executive editor's qualities as a leader.

"I don't know that I'm so much of a chameleon that I can do a Dean impression, but I felt like I wanted to touch what I felt was the essence of his contribution, which is that of a leader, and a quiet leader, and a supporter, and someone who understands the costs of investigative journalism for the journalists themselves," Braugher said.

When the pair finally did meet at the New York Film Festival on October 13, Braugher said it was their matching outfits that made him believe he "channeled the right Dean."

"We were both wearing double-breasted suits," he recalled, per Vanity Fair. "Two men in double-breasted suits — that said something. I said to myself, 'Yes, I've channeled the right Dean.'"

Jennifer Ehle portrayed Laura Madden, one of the women who accused Weinstein of sexual abuse and one of the first to go on record to speak against him in Kantor and Twohey's report.

In an interview with The Times, Madden said, while she had no notes on the script of the biopic, she was "soundly upset by" the film and "physically recoiled."

"I just felt I was facing this person that I had become that I did not want to be," Madden said, holding back tears. "And it was really upsetting and shocking. I was upset that my life had gone in the direction it went. It was quite awful."

"It's kind of like watching your own car crash," Madden continued. "In a film, it's very defining because in a book, people are left to their own imaginations. It's probably testament to how good Jennifer is, but it upsets me."

Samantha Morton captured audiences in a moving nine-minute scene as she relayed the emotional experience of former Weinstein assistant Zelda Perkins, who accused Weinstein of attempting to rape a Miramax co-worker and was later intimidated and silenced by an NDA.

Perkins, who started working for Weinstein in 1995 based in London, told The Times last month that seeing her life experience being portrayed on-screen was "a very difficult process for me."

Perkins, who launched a campaign dedicated to banning the use of NDAs to buy silence, CantBuyMySilence.com, initially sent notes back to producer Dede Gardner, specifically asking to center the lengthy scene on dismantling the very system that allows for such abuses of NDAs.

"I stood up in 1998. I stood up in 2017. I'm still standing up now," Perkins said. "My life currently is defined by the campaign, which is trying to tear up this horrific legal tool of NDA. That is what enables the powerful. Harvey is just a man, a weak man. And he is a man who was allowed to behave like that by society because we are sycophants to fame and power."

Angela Yeoh portrayed former Miramax assistant Rowena Chiu.

Chiu accused Weinstein of attempting to rape her while on a business trip to the Venice Film Festival in 1998.

After The Times article was published exposing other accusations against Weinstein, Chiu told the San Francisco Chronicle that she was horrified by the accounts.

"We knew Harvey was a terrible person, but the extent of his aggressions ... was truly shocking," Chiu said.

In October 2019, Chiu wrote an op-ed for The New York Times describing her experience and the harrowing encounter she had with Weinstein at the film festival in 1998. More than two decades after she said Weinstein had attempted to rape her, Chiu said she "finally stepped out of the shadows to allow the public to know my name."

"I am happy that my children can know my secret; I am grateful to be able to be honest with family and friends, who are coming forward in droves to offer support," she wrote.
"I can briefly glory in the relief that I am no longer sitting on a sickening secret that has — finally and ultimately — come to light."

Lisa Bloom, portrayed by Anastasia Barzee in the film, briefly worked as an adviser for Weinstein in late 2016.

In 2017, Twohey and Kantor unveiled in their reporting how Bloom planned to help Weinstein wage a smear campaign against Rose McGowan, one of the most high-profile accusers against Weinstein.

"I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world because I have represented so many of them," Bloom wrote in a 2016 memo to Weinstein at the time, per their book. Bloom had previously represented women against Bill Cosby and Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.

She added: "We can place an article re her becoming increasingly unglued so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she's discredited."

Two days after The Times published their report, Bloom resigned as counsel for Weinstein, saying it had been a "colossal mistake" that she regretted.

"I thought this was an opportunity to change the narrative. I thought that this was an opportunity to work with somebody on the other side and try to get them to behave better," she told The Ringer in 2017. "I don't usually have opportunities like that, and I got tired of the old playbook. I thought that we would do something different, and it would be an improvement. But obviously, it was not well received."

"Succession" actor Peter Friedman played former Weinstein lawyer Lanny Davis, who resigned as counsel to the disgraced producer alongside Bloom in 2017.

Davis, a longtime Democratic Party political operative, also advised former President Bill Clinton during his scandal with Monica Lewinsky.

Weinstein is only portrayed in the movie by his voice and from the side and behind.

There is one point in the film where Weinstein's real voice is used. Police recording obtained by Ronan Farrow, who reported on the sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein for The New Yorker, included a conversation between Weinstein and Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez in a hotel hallway.

In 2015, Gutierrez, then 22, accused the disgraced Hollywood producer of groping her and putting his hands up her skirt. She filed a complaint with the New York Police Department, and the next night, assisted in an undercover sting operation where she wore a wire while visiting Weinstein's hotel room.

"Oh, please, I'm sorry, just come on in," Weinstein is heard saying in the audio. "I'm used to that. Come on. Please."

"You're used to that?" Gutierrez asks.

"Yes. Come in … I won't do it again, come on, sit here," he is heard responding in the audio. "Sit here for a minute, please?"

The two-and-a-half minute audio is featured in full in "She Said," which film producer Dede Gardner recognized as an "untraditional" thing to do, she said in an interview with The Times last month.

"I think it's obviously an unusual and untraditional thing to drop a two-and-a-half minute thing into the middle of a film," the award-winning producer told The Times, "but I felt like the only way to honor her properly and the profound bravery that she showed was to keep that whole."

The voices of Rose McGowan and Donald Trump were overheard in phone calls in the film, but the actress and former president didn't actually participate in the film. Instead, they were played by Keilly McQuail and James Austin Johnson, respectively.

McGowan, who was one of the first women to publicly accuse Weinstein of sexual assault, originally had a role in the biopic and had planned to star in it.

"Rose didn't want to be in the film, and we respected that," screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz told Variety in November. "Of course, her bravery speaking out and her courage made the story possible."

American actress Gwyneth Paltrow and French actress Judith Godrèche, who are also overheard in phone calls in the film, actually did participate in the film and had recorded audio for it.

Ashley Judd, who was the most high-profile celebrity to accuse Weinstein of sexual abuse in The Times article, also portrayed herself in the film.

"Ashley was in from the first moment I met her," director Maria Schrader told the Los Angeles Times. "She's an incredible, impressive person."