Jennifer Esposito’s rage at a ‘Harvey Weinstein-esque’ producer fueled ‘Fresh Kills’

20-5 decades back, Jennifer Esposito suggests, a producer virtually ended her career. Now she’s channeling her anger into her directorial debut.

The “Blue Bloods” star experienced just been “catapulted to Hollywood” following her position in Spike Lee’s 1999 thriller “Summer of Sam,” she mentioned past week on the “She Pivots” podcast. Then, a week into filming a new film, the producer — whom Esposito still left unnamed — fired her “for no reason.”

“This was a infamous, brutal producer, a Harvey Weinstein-esque kind of man or woman. He virtually had the power and made use of it to absolutely end a youthful girl’s vocation at 26 yrs previous,” she reported.

This producer allegedly discouraged anyone he understood from choosing her, falsely proclaiming she was a drug addict who experienced locked herself in a trailer on set. “Never occurred,” Esposito reported.

She also thinks he killed her odds to star in “Charlie’s Angels” soon after she had by now acquired an give.

Esposito’s agency understood of the producer’s steps, she mentioned, but did not intervene simply because of his significant profile and sector connections. Ultimately, the younger actor’s team dropped her, and she was still left with no representation for 2½ a long time.

“That was a genuinely, really painful time,” Esposito claimed, for a “kid who experienced this aspiration because she was a infant.”

“But it was also a attractive time, due to the fact if I was not that kid, I would have hardly ever been this lady. I would hardly ever have wrote [sic] and directed what I just did, mainly because, as I’ve explained to a several men and women that know me well, ‘Fresh Kills,’ my film, was for the 26-12 months-aged child who bought slaughtered.”

“Fresh Kills,” which came out Friday, is Esposito’s feature-movie directorial debut. A feminist twist on the typical mob film, it follows the wives, daughters and sisters of the adult men who run an structured criminal offense family members. Co-starring together with Esposito are Emily Bader, Odessa A’zion, Domenick Lombardozzi and Annabella Sciorra — also a “Blue Bloods” alum.

The film is personal to Esposito, she explained, as it’s set in 1980s Staten Island — the borough wherever she grew up.

“I noticed a large amount of violence as a child — it was just a tough community and a great deal of significant mafia community,” she reported. “I just generally believed, ‘Why are they so indignant?’

“But as I went by my lifestyle and I begun to go into my occupation,” she continued, “that anger and that rage that I saw started off to come to feel really common to me.”

Not numerous individuals believed in “Fresh Kills” from the starting, Esposito informed KTLA, and many provided her dollars to move away from directing it. “I was presented $5 million if a male would direct it as a substitute of myself. I was provided a great deal of income for stars to be in it.”

But she trapped to her guns, mortgaging her household to finance the task — and it would seem to have paid out off.

“Fresh Kills” premiered a yr in the past at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and has considering the fact that garnered quite a few awards on the pageant circuit. One particular evaluation said it “stands tall along with the best put up-’Godfather’ gangster films.”

“These people are touching people, male and feminine, in means that are so gorgeous to me,” Esposito stated throughout her “She Pivots” episode. “To me, which is generally what artwork is supposed to be.”