Rose McGowan walks back Natalie Portman Oscars cape criticism: 'I lost sight of the bigger picture'

Rose McGowan has partially retracted controversial comments she made about actress Natalie Portman, saying that she had “lost sight of the bigger picture.”

McGowan criticised Portman’s protest cape in support of snubbed female directors at the Oscars, calling her protest “deeply offensive” and a “fraud.”

After a tense and very public back and forth between the pair, McGowan seemed to draw things to a close with a tweet yesterday.

Without naming Portman, she said, “My critique should’ve been about Hollywood’s ongoing culture of silence. I realize that by critiquing someone personally, I lost sight of the bigger picture.”

“All voices, however spoken, are valid,” she said. “Let’s all keep pushing boundaries in whatever way we can, it’s time to get loud.”

Previously, Portman (who has in the past called out the Golden Globes for its “all-male” line up of Best Director nominees) wore a striking Dior embroidered gown and cape.

Along the edge of the cape, the names of female directors that could have been nominated for this year’s Academy Awards were stitched in gold: including Little Women’s Greta Gerwig, The Farewell’s Lulu Wang and Hustler’s Lorene Scafaria to name just a few.

Calling it her “subtle way” of paying tribute to “the women who were not recognised for their incredible work this year”, Portman was both praised and criticised for her actions - with some celebrating her subtle protest, while others felt she had not gone far enough.

McGowan was in the latter camp and wrote on Facebook last Tuesday that Portman was “an actress acting the part of someone who cares. As so many of them do.”

She also told Portman to “hang up your embroidered activist cloak.”

“I find Portman’s type of activism deeply offensive to those of us who actually do the work. I’m not writing this out of bitterness, I am writing out of disgust. I just want her and other actresses to walk the walk,” she said.

McGowan also criticised her for her “lip service” and “fake support”, citing Portman’s track record of working mostly with male directors - even within her own production company. She wrote, “Natalie, you have worked with two female directors in your very long career- one of them was you. You have a production company that has hired exactly one female director- you.”

She also recounted how she had seen Portman speak about gender diversity at a Women in Film event, where she said she realised the Garden State star and other speakers were “frauds.”

She said, “You reeled off depressing statistics and then we all went back to our salads...You say nothing, you do nothing.”

Portman responded shortly afterwards, saying that she agreed with McGowan that it was “inaccurate” to call her embroidered cape “brave.”

Portman also added that the cape was meant to be a “simple nod” and that she didn’t want it to “distract from [female filmmakers’] great achievements.”

She said in a statement to CNN, “Brave is a term I more strongly associate with actions like those of the women who have been testifying against Harvey Weinstein the last few weeks, under incredible pressure.”

She also addressed wide criticism that she hadn’t worked with many female directors, saying that there were many “unmade films” that she had tried to make. She said, “It is true I've only made a few films with women. In my long career, I've only gotten the chance to work with female directors a few times.”

“Unfortunately, the unmade films I have tried to make are a ghost history,” she said. “As Stacy Smith of USC has well documented, female films have been incredibly hard to get made at studios, or to get independently financed. If these films do get made, women face enormous challenges during the making of them.”

“I have had the experience a few times of helping get female directors hired on projects which they were then forced out of because of the conditions they faced at work,” she continued.

“After they are made, female-directed films face difficulty getting into festivals, getting distribution and getting accolades because of the gatekeepers at every level.”

“So I want to say, I have tried, and I will keep trying. While I have not yet been successful, I am hopeful that we are stepping into a new day,” Portman finished.

According to watchdog Women and Hollywood, female directors accounted for just 10.6% of the top 100 grossing films in 2019 and over the course of 2007-2019 only 13 women of colour have directed any of the top 1,300 movies over that period Only five women have ever been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, with The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow being the only woman to ever win it.