Pose executive producer Janet Mock caused jaws to drop Thursday night when she went off script at the show’s season 3 premiere event in New York City.
During her 15-minute speech, Mock stunned the audience of actors, FX executives and reporters, when she slammed Hollywood, demanded equal pay and revealed she cheated on her boyfriend with a member of the show’s crew, according to Page Six.
“I’m hurting, y’all. I see injustice and it hurts me inside,” Mock said at the in-person, socially-distanced event.
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Page Six, which sent a reporter to the gathering at Jazz at Lincoln Center, said the room fell silent as Mock, 38, spoke.
“Why am I making $40,000 a motherf—ing episode? Huh?” Mock, who is Black, Asian and transgender asked. “I am angry! This is truth. This is motherf—ing truth.”
Mock, who is also a writer and director on the show, then blasted the entertainment industry.
“F–k Hollywood … Does this make you uncomfortable? It should. It should make you f–king shake in your motherf–king boots. This is speaking truth. This is what ‘Pose’ is,” she said.
The Daily Beast, which also covered the gathering, described Mock’s speech as “uncomfortable and messy, and possibly industry-changing.”
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At another point in her comments, Mock told boyfriend Angel Bismark Curiel to stand up and admitted she’d been unfaithful. “Stand up … right now!” she said.
“Let me tell you something about love,” she continued. “Today, I was gonna let [Angel] go … I was gonna let you go, right, but what did I do? I f–ked someone on the crew, right?”
Someone in the audience gasped and asked, “What the hell is happening?”
“Angel, Angel. I’m not losing you. You hear me? You are f–king important to me,” Mock added. “I don’t want to live in a house alone. I want you. You motherf–ker. Right there. That’s who I want. I’m getting what’s mine.”
At one point, she did discuss the show, which is ending after three seasons.
“It’s a show, but it means so much to everyone to ‘ensure that we enable Black and Brown trans women to make it’ because that sounds good,” she said. “It makes you comfortable to talk like that because then I don’t scare you into facing the f–king truth. You all have stomped on us.”
As previously reported, Pose is ending after its third season. The FX series, created by Ryan Murphy and Steven Canals, centers on ballroom culture and the LGBTQ community.
In March, Murphy described the series as one of the “creative highlights” of his career.
“To go from the beginning of my career in the late ’90s when it was nearly impossible to get an LGBTQ character on television to Pose — which will go down in history for having the largest LGBTQ cast of all time — is a truly full circle moment for me. This show made history behind and in front of the camera, and its legacy runs deep,” Murphy said in a statement.
The final season of Pose premieres tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX.
