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If you watched and loved The Craft growing up, then you know the circle of wannabe witches wouldn’t be complete without all four women: Fairuza Balk, Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell, and Rachel True. A few conventions coming up are trying to reunite the women for fans of the supernatural horror film, but unfortunately, they’re trying to exclude True.
The 52-year-old actress shared in a series of tweets over the weekend that she caught wind of this through Balk, and she had many valid thoughts she posted on why such a move was a slap in the face. That included the fact that she was also excluded from publicity opportunities with her three white cast members back when the movie first came out in 1996. As she put it, “A Hollywood lifetime of sucking up racist aggressions, micro & macro while white actors insisted right up until Dump took office that racism was over… takes a toll,” and she’s “tired as f–k.”
To make things worse, someone affiliated with one of the conventions responded privately, which True made public. The person said, “we’re gonna pass on Rachel. This was totally uncalled for.”
But was it? By not mentioning the specific conventions, she gave whoever excluded her the opportunity to right something that was truly uncalled for: excluding her, the only Black woman, from a film reunion she was a part of. As a Black woman, there’s no way you could look at that as anything but a slight.
True would expand on her thoughts in an IG Live video where she addressed the fact that after constantly being left out in dealings with this cult-classic film over the years, she was over keeping her mouth shut about it. She also noted that her experience was not unique, and that’s the true problem.
“For me, to be honest, the button it pushes for me is when we did the movie, I was already told by production, ‘Take this money offer, take it or leave it. We have another Black girl,'” she said. “And then at the premiere…there was press afterward that I was excluded from. And then there was the MTV Movie Awards that year, that even though I had two movies coming out, the other three girls got to present while I sat in the audience. So I guess it’s less about whining about how I was left out of certain things, but more, it just kind of hit me on a level that as a person of color, during my career, I had to deal with these things and suck them up and just stick them somewhere. A lot of Black people or people of color know exactly what I’m talking about. You kind of have these things that happen to you, these microaggressions, or macroaggressions, and you kind of just have to suck them up. And I think yesterday I just sort of realized that maybe that’s why I was okay with taking a little break from Hollywood, because I was just tired of sucking up sh-t like that.”
True does plan to return to film and TV work, though. She said that she will appear on the FX comedy Better Things this spring (after she finishes her tarot book). But incidents like this are a reminder of what she doesn’t miss about the industry.
Our main thought though, is why would her co-stars sign on for these events knowing she had been left out? An e-mail heads-up from Balk is nice, but what would have been better would be Balk, Tunney and Campbell working together to ensure she was included. It’s a pretty simple action. However, True said she wasn’t looking for them to take such actions on her behalf. Instead, she just wanted people to stop disregarding such struggles as her taking things too personally. How else is one supposed to take it?
“I’m not trying to get in the middle of their coin. I’m not trying to disrupt that,” she said in the IG Live clip. “I don’t think they should give up the gig because I’m not there. I guess that would be such a great show of solidarity, but I don’t actually want that or expect that. I want them to make their money, right? It is uncomfortable though, to me that people don’t understand why this might be upsetting to me.”
Sadly, this isn’t the first time True has talked about being shafted in the industry. Last year she said that she barely makes anything from syndicated episodes of the UPN show she starred in, Half & Half.
“Some of my cast mates & their agents negotiated better residual deals, know what you’re signing, artists,” she wrote, “won’t make that same mistake again.”
