Actress Reagan Gomez’s account of her experience guest-starring on “That ‘70s Show” has resurfaced amid news of series star Danny Masterson’s sentencing for raping two women in the early 2000s at the height of his successful career.
Masterson, 47, was convicted of two of the three counts of rape against him during his retrial in May; a jury was unable to reach a verdict during his first trial in December. He was sentenced on Sept. 7 to 30 years to life in prison for sexual assaults that reportedly occurred at his Hollywood Hills home between 2001 and 2003.
The actor was part of the main cast of the sitcom, which aired on FOX for eight seasons between August 1998 and May 2006. Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, Wilmer Valderrama, Laura Prepon and Topher Grace rounded out the show’s teenage cast.
Gomez, best known for starring on “The Parent Hood,” appeared on “That ’70s Show” in season 4 episode 4, “Hyde Gets the Girl,” as the girlfriend to Hyde, played by Masterson. In 2019, she tweeted that “working on that show was a nightmare.” Her character was originally written as reoccurring, but criticisms of her performance nixed those plans.
Issues began at the table read, where Gomez performed her lines in the same manner in which she had during her audition with Masterson. “ON MY WAY HOME I get a frantic call from my manager. They didn’t like my read,” she tweeted. So she re-worked her delivery with her acting coach, who said the best approach was to make her “Emotionless. Basically, no black s—t.”
She claimed that the director told her she needed to have “Less sass.” The director allegedly also told her things like, “Don’t be cute” and “Too Cute. Again,” while in front of the cast on their “white a— set.” “I was mortified,” she wrote.
“I felt so alone and humiliated. They kept me on for the rest of the week but no one in the cast talked to me. It was horrible. They never called me back,” added Gomez.
Amid outrage over Masterson’s convictions, fans have called for the show to be pulled from air, similar to “The Cosby Show” after Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault during a 2018 retrial.
“The Cosby Show was the first tv series to ever make me laugh uncontrollably as a toddler and I watched That 70s Show every day after school for 4+ years, it really sucks having your memories/spent time retroactively poisoned with the truth,” read a social media post.
“Networks pulled ‘The Cosby Show’ after Bill Cosby’s conviction. The Same thing should happen to ‘That 70s Show’ after Danny Masterson has been sentenced. But I seriously doubt it,” read another. Cosby’s conviction was overturned in 2021.
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