Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show

By Sam Barsanti | May 17, 2018 | 11:59pm

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At the beginning of the month, when the Arrested Development news machine was just coming back online, Netflix confirmed that Jeffrey Tambor would still be appearing on the show despite the sexual harassment allegations that got him fired from Amazon’s Transparent. Today Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz has addressed the allegations against Tambor and why he’s staying on the show, telling Entertainment Weekly that they were already done shooting the show’s fifth season when the issue came up so “there would be no show” if they had tried to cut him out. Hurwitz also noted that he chose to support Tambor—who he considers a close friend even though he can be “difficult” and a “grump”—rather than believing allegations “that [Tambor] disputes, that Amazon hasn’t shared, and that we have never experienced any complaints about.”

EW says the rest of the cast “expressed similar sentiments” about Tambor, though his onscreen wife, Jessica Walter, says she’s “privately processing” her feelings about an outburst he had on set while filming the new season of Arrested Development. She says she never saw anything from him that “crossed the line” regarding sexual harassment, but she notes that she has “great empathy for the courage of people who feel they have been harassed in any form speaking out” in addition to “sympathy for people who have been unjustly accused.”