How One TV Role Nearly Ended Laura Dern's Hollywood Career - The Shocking Backlash

The Role That Almost Derailed Laura Dern’s Career: “How Backward We Are”

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Hollywood is one of the most uncertain industries out there. One minute, you can be the apple of everyone’s eye, the next, you’re dropped like old news. All it takes is one wrong move to put you in cinematic jail, but if you’ve got what it takes, there’s a chance you can bounce back.

Laura Dern found great success in the 1980s, appearing in the classic riot grrrl precursor Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, when she was just 13 years old. Within the next few years, she starred in some compelling titles, like the dark coming-of-age tale Smooth Talk and David Lynch’s mesmerising exposé of suburbia, Blue Velvet.

Yet, there was a role that she boldly took on in the late 1990s that threatened to change everything, almost derailing her career. Following an Oscar nomination for Rambling Rose and a role in one of the biggest movies of the decade, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Dern’s career reached spectacular heights, but soon, it started to crash back down.

You’d think that being in Jurassic Park would mean that things could only go up from here, but instead, an appearance on a certain controversial television episode seemed to put a spanner in the works. It was 1997, and Dern accepted the part of a lesbian in the sitcom Ellen, famously being the one to whom Ellen DeGeneres’ titular character comes out as gay.

The episode made history, with the character becoming the first in an American show to actually come out, coinciding with DeGeneres coming out in real life too, and it’s just crazy to think that such a monumental event happened so recently, and that this episode would prove to be so controversial.

Dern was thrilled to be asked to be a part of the episode, but she immediately started to receive concerned advice, as she told Vulture, “I didn’t think twice about it. It was a great opportunity. And then the calls started coming in once I’d said yes, from a couple of advisers in Hollywood who were out gay men, [telling me] to not do it. A lot of people in my life really worried.”

In fact, the production took a turn when the police had to get involved: “A flood of cops swarmed the set and the stage while we were rehearsing. They’re like, ‘There’s been a bomb threat, we’re sweeping the stage.’ And they start literally rushing us off the stage. We all spent the next couple of years really struggling in work and safety. It was radical to experience that. It was the only time I ever experienced having to have full security detail.”

Following the episode’s airing, Dern was shocked to discover that she actually did experience a temporary setback in her career, with opportunities suddenly drying up. She couldn’t believe it. Only a few years before, she’s literally been in a movie that, for a time, was the highest-grossing film ever made.

Adding, “It was significant. It was significant because I was doing successful independent movies, and, only months before that, I was in Jurassic Park, the most successful movie ever. So it was like, you’re being offered this, you’re being offered that – and it just stopped. Which is kind of wild. By good fortune of the long path of a career, you can look back and say, how great to have it be felt, how backward we are.”

She did bounce back, of course, winning an Oscar for Marriage Story in 2020, while DeGeneres found popularity with her talk show, but the backlash to ‘The Puppy Episode’ shows just how taboo homosexuality has always been in Hollywood.