Award-winning playwright, Jez Butterworth, has revealed that his new play is part-inspired by his encounters with Harvey Weinstein. Butterworth’s previous works include The Ferryman, Jerusalem, and Britannia. 

He told BBC’s Front Row radio show that his new play, The Hills of California, is partly inspired by working with Weinstein on the 2001 thriller, Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman. 

He said:  

 “My very early experiences in the film business were with Miramax, specifically Harvey Weinstein. It became very clear, very quickly that that was the rules of the game. I was meeting actresses in California who wanted to do my film but would not talk to me because they’d had encounters with him.”

In 2018, after the accusations against Weinstein were made public, Butterworth told Radio Times magazine that while on set Butterworth punched Weinstein in defense of a producer on the film. Weinstein demanded that the producer be removed from the set and punched the producer after not getting his way. In response, Butterworth punched him.

In 2020, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for two felony counts in New York. In LA, two years after his original sentencing, he was found guilty of 3 more offenses and was sentenced to 16 more years.