Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway

Scott Rudin, the powerful producer who was exiled from Broadway and Hollywood four years ago after allegations of bullying led to widespread denunciations and even protesters in the streets, has been quietly preparing to return to show business.

After what he called “a decent amount of therapy,” apologies to many people and a period of reading and reflection holed up on Long Island, Rudin said that he had decided he wanted to make theater again. He is at peace, he said, with the reality that not everyone is likely to welcome him back.

He called his previous behavior, particularly toward subordinates, “bone-headed” and “narcissistic.” He acknowledged that he had long yelled at his assistants (“Yes, of course”) and that he had on occasion thrown things at people (“Very, very rarely”).

“I was just too rough on people,” he said.

But Rudin — who produced films including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network” and Broadway shows including “The Book of Mormon” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” — said he was confident that from now on he would be able to maintain his exacting standards without terrorizing others.

“I have a lot more self-control than I had four years ago,” he said. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy.” Also, he added, “I don’t want to let anybody down. Not just myself. My husband, my family and collaborators.”

Rudin, 66, agreed to discuss his ambitious plans in response to requests to talk about indications that he was planning to return to producing. The result was his first detailed interview about his downfall, his time away from Broadway and his hopes to mount a comeback. His return is likely to be controversial, given that reports of the ways in which he berated and mistreated assistants helped lead to a reconsideration of workplace culture in theater.

Rudin said that he planned to stage four plays in New York next season — three of them on Broadway — and that he had found writers, actors, creative teams, investors and theater owners willing to work with him to make that possible.

“It wasn’t that I felt passionately like anybody had missed me, or that I had missed it,” he said. “But I felt like I wasn’t done, and that if I still had more work I was able to make, that I should make it — that I had an obligation to something that I really care about, which is the theater.”

The Broadway League, the trade association of producers and theater owners, declined to comment on his planned return, as did several people who reported having bad experiences with Rudin. Al Vincent Jr., the executive director of Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing actors and stage managers, noted that union contracts “hold employers responsible for ensuring a workplace free of bullying, discrimination and harassment.”

“Since Scott Rudin last worked with Equity members, in reaction to his previous behaviors, Equity has taken steps to strengthen those contractual protections,” Vincent said. He added that the union had also taken steps to limit the use of nondisclosure agreements “so they can’t shield abusive employers.”

Rudin had been a prolific producer of artistically ambitious, and often successful, work, but was dogged for decades by complaints about yelling at, firing and occasionally hurling things at subordinates.

Then, in 2021, The Hollywood Reporter ran an exposé about his abusive behavior toward assistants, which prompted widespread outrage and led him to step back from producing. Protesters marched on Broadway, chanting “Scott Rudin has got to go.” The New York Times then revealed new details about how he wielded power with actors, playwrights, agents and business associates: In addition to excoriating staffers he also deployed anger, threats and occasional lawsuits against perceived foes. Rudin announced that he was resigning from the Broadway League.

Rudin — an EGOT who has won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and 18 Tony Awards — became a pariah.

“What happened in ’21 was in some basic way inevitable,” he said. “Very little was said that hadn’t been said many times. So I always, frankly, felt that once the culture started to change, one day it was going to change for me.”

He declined to enumerate his misdeeds, saying, “I’m not attempting to create a menu of miscreant behavior.” He added: “A lot of what was said was true. Some of what was said wasn’t true. But I didn’t feel there was any point in responding to all of it because what’s the point of parsing bad behavior? It was bad behavior. I own it.”

And why did he behave poorly toward others?

“I don’t think I was ever really in the dark about why I was rough on people,” he said. “I knew why I was rough on people. For a long time, it seemed like a price I could live with. I wasn’t really thinking about what price other people could live with, because producing at the level of volume that I was requires a level of narcissism. If you don’t inherently believe you’re doing better than other people, why are you doing it? There are better ways to make a living.”

He said that he had made the “profound mistake” of believing that “anything and anybody who got in the way of what I was trying to do could cause it to fail.”

“But it isn’t true,” he said. “And being away from it for a while made me feel differently about it.”

Rudin’s attempted comeback arrives at a time when the nation appears much less unforgiving of men accused of bad behavior or misconduct than it did just a few years ago. President Trump was elected to a second term after being convicted of falsifying business records; Andrew M. Cuomo is a front-runner in the New York mayor’s race three years after he resigned as governor; and the comedian Louis C.K. is selling out arenas after acknowledging sexual misconduct.

“I’m going to try to come back and make some more good work, and people will feel how they feel,” Rudin said. “And if some people are really angry about it, they’ll have the right to be angry about it.”

He has not been entirely off the grid since his career imploded. He said he had continued to see shows and offer advice to people in the industry who sought his help. And he was particularly involved in helping Barry Diller, a longtime friend, plan the ambitious artistic programming at Little Island, the small park Diller built in the Hudson River. Rudin found working on something where he was not in charge liberating.

He also spent time reshuffling his life. He sold his Upper West Side co-op, and then sold the place he had intended to next occupy, a West Village townhouse he had purchased from Graydon Carter, the editor. He moved to his weekend home in East Hampton, started building a house in Connecticut and then decided that project was not how he wanted to spend his energy. Now he has sold the East Hampton house and is preparing to move to the North Fork of Long Island. He also sold a lot of art, deciding there was no point just keeping it in storage.

Working on Little Island rekindled his interest in producing. “A lot of producing is thinking ‘What if?’” he said. “And I hadn’t thought ‘What if?’ in a really long time.”

He decided to see if he could fill a void in New York’s postpandemic theater scene, which has seen some splashy musicals and some star-powered plays but, from Rudin’s point of view, less adventurous programing than it should have.

“I think the economics of Broadway have gotten tougher and tougher, and that some producers are throwing movie stars at that model as a way of cauterizing the bleeding,” he said. “But I don’t believe it’s a sustainable model because overall, what has historically worked has been really good shows with really great people in them, whether they were movie stars or not. And I think using stars as a replacement for quality has a sell-by date printed all over it.”

He said he worried that there was “a paucity of work that’s truly, truly achieved” and too much work that feels “first drafty.”

Rudin said he had agreed to talk for this article because he felt it was a necessary step if he was ever to move forward.

“I felt that I owed it to people to talk about coming back if I was going to,” he said.

“I own what I did,” he added. “I feel proud of the work overall, and badly about the cost of it to some people who worked on it.”

Asked about apologies, Rudin said: “I apologized to the people I felt I needed to apologize to. In many cases they were people I had apologized to previously, some of them numerous times. Not everybody was receptive to it.”

He said he had more than a dozen shows in various stages of development, including some well-known musicals, but he is starting with plays and several of the forthcoming productions will star Laurie Metcalf and be directed by Joe Mantello. (Neither of them responded to requests for comment through a representative.)

This fall he plans the first Broadway production of “Little Bear Ridge Road,” a play by Samuel D. Hunter that was staged last year in Chicago by Steppenwolf Theater Company. The New York production, like the one in Chicago, will star Metcalf and will be directed by Mantello. Next spring Rudin plans to stage “Montauk,” a new play by David Hare, also starring Metcalf and directed by Mantello. The following season he says he hopes to revive “Death of a Salesman” in a production with Metcalf and Nathan Lane, again directed by Mantello.

“I think Laurie is the greatest actress in America,” Rudin said. “I do. I also believe in Laurie as a partner. Laurie is an amazing person to be in a room with, because the way she takes ownership of a text is remarkable to see, but it ignites a quality of work around her.”

He has other plans, too. This fall he plans to stage a Broadway production of “Cottonfield,” a new play by Bruce Norris, which Rudin said would be directed by Robert O’Hara. The collaboration is noteworthy because Rudin and Norris had a publicized falling-out in 2012; Rudin has been known to torpedo and then rebuild relationships over the course of his stormy career.

He allowed that “hotheaded people, in which I would number myself, have a tendency, especially when confronted with other hotheaded people, to blow something up beyond what it’s worth.”

And next winter, Rudin plans to stage an Off Broadway production of a new play by Wallace Shawn called “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” which will be directed by André Gregory, who was Shawn’s co-star in “My Dinner With André.”

The plays Rudin plans to produce, at least initially, are challenging and ambitious, and it is not clear that others were ready to stage them. “When I think about the work that I did that was good, it was almost always work that nobody else wanted to do,” Rudin said. “In almost every movie that I did that worked, I was always the only person who wanted to do it. So I kind of feel like in this round of making work, if somebody else wants to do something, they should. If I’m the only person who wants to do it, and I feel strongly about it, it should be me.”

And will he return to movies too? “I want to do this first,” he said. “I want to see what it feels like. I want, frankly, to make sure I’m still good at it, and I want to make sure that I’m not going to be killed by a sniper’s bullet on 45th Street.”

“I made 130 movies and probably nearly a hundred shows, so it’s not like I didn’t get a shot to do what I wanted to do — I had more shots than anybody,” he added. “In a way, I think one of the good things that happened with me being out for a few years is that it created room for other people, which I think is a great thing and a really healthy thing. But at the same time there’s a corner of it that I enjoyed occupying, which is making good work with good friends and people that I trusted and wanted to be in a room with. So I’m going to do that.”