Veteran actor Frank Langella has been fired from Netflix’s new horror series The Fall Of The House Of Usher, Deadline reports, after a misconduct investigation on the show’s set reportedly found that he’d “been involved in unacceptable conduct” on set.
News that Langella was being investigated for sexual harassment on the set of the series first broke on Tuesday, courtesy of a TMZ report whose text we’re going to just re-print here, since it’s a fairly straightforward run-down of the allegations:
As for what exactly happened, a source close to production tells us the 84-year-old actor allegedly made an inappropriate joke that was sexual in nature. Our sources also say in the context of his performance, possibly during rehearsal, he touched the leg of a female costar, and further drew attention to the action when he jokingly said something like “Did you like that?”
Langella played Roderick Usher in the adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe story (in which the character is normally shown to be significantly younger than Langella’s 84). Filming on the series won’t be interrupted by the firing, at least not yet; Langella wasn’t set to film this week, apparently, and the current plan is to film non-Roderick scenes until a new actor has been cast in the part.
Langella has worked fairly consistently in recent years, in both television and film; he appeared as the judge in Aaron Sorkin’s 2020 feature The Trial Of The Chicago 7, and before that as Jim Carrey’s controlling father in Showtime series Kidding and as handler Gabriel in The Americans.
Neither representatives for Langella, nor Netflix, have so far responded to press inquiries about the investigation or the actor’s firing. The Fall Of The House Of Usher was apparently roughly halfway through its production schedule, although all of Langella’s scenes will presumably now have to be re-filmed.