The women of Fox News depicted in Bombshell repeatedly insist they are not feminists—even as they steel themselves to upend the cable channel’s toxic culture of sexual harassment under Roger Ailes’s reign. This paradox—women who shudder at the word “feminist” achieving feminist goals—was what intrigued Oscar-winning screenwriter Charles Randolph (The Big Short) when he sat down to write Bombshell.
“I was interested in telling the story from the perspective of those conservative women,” said Randolph, whose script revolves around the real-life battles that anchors Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) waged against their boss, plus the fictionalized plight of an aspiring anchor named Kayla (Margot Robbie). “It shows the issue [of sexual harassment] transcends politics, which is important. But they were also just entertaining, fun characters. They had strong internal, unique conflicts. They were often brave. That narrative of feminist determination came out of Fox News. I’m shocked that it did and delighted that it did because that’s an interesting story.”
To research, Randolph spoke to more than a dozen people connected to Fox about workplace culture and harassment patterns of Ailes, who was ousted from the network he built in 2017. Ailes, it turned out, had just as many paradoxes as his underlings. While over 20 women accused Ailes of sexual harassment—including his former anchors Carlson, Kelly, as well as host Andrea Tantaros and reporter Rudi Bakhtiar—the Fox News head was allegedly respectful enough not to harass married women.
“He had either an old-school understanding of the sanctity of marriage or he had a fear of the woman having a protector,” said Randolph. “My source did not know, but said that [the harassment] was sort of a thing that you would get when you were going through a divorce or you would get when you were first there and you were known to be single. A boyfriend wouldn’t prevent him from [approaching]…. But one of my sources, who’s quite a powerful source, said that was something that was discussed internally. That once you were married, you were beyond predation on a certain level.”
Ailes had plenty of other contradictions which made him a complex screenplay subject. In the film, Ailes (played by John Lithgow) is portrayed as both feared and “beloved by many people inside his institution.” Explained Randolph, “Roger could be very funny. He was a genius at what he did—and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story. Because that’s the kind of perpetrator who’s truly dangerous…the true mentor, who turns on you one day, which is what happened with Megyn earlier in her career…. Roger had the charisma, had a lot of the power, had a lot of the charm…but then was capable of this other very dark stuff.”
It was important for Randolph to not only show the women who brushed off Ailes’s advances, but depict a woman on the other side of the sexual harassment spectrum at Fox—who uses her sexuality “to move up the ladder in a way that she thinks is necessary.” Randolph said he based Robbie’s fictional character Kayla on the narratives of three different women who had direct sexual interaction with Ailes. “It’s a story that we don’t tell because those women do not raise their hand and say ‘me too’ often. The crude way of putting this—and please don’t quote me without acknowledging that it’s not something I’m comfortable totally saying—is we never tell the story of the woman who says yes. But we need to, because that’s just as fascinating and just as complicated and just as unjust as some of the other stories. Because people say yes in the context of feeling they have no other choice.”
Even though Kayla thinks she taking control of her career, said Randolph, she is still a victim.
“Kayla thinks she’s the one who’s playing the situation and that’s a theme throughout the film—we all think we are control of the conversation when sometimes the conversation is controlling us. And that’s really Megyn’s arc as a character,” said Randolph—referring to how Kelly labors over whether she will go public with her own accusations, and give Carlson the kind of public support that ultimately helped oust Ailes. “She finds that her silence has made her complicit and put another generation of women coming behind her at risk, and she comes to slowly understand that.”