The day Michelle Pfeiffer went on strike in the middle of shooting: “It was very traumatic”
As Michelle Pfeiffer looked around a freezing cold set in Soviet Russia in late 1989, she was horrified that while her castmates and she were being served steaming hot bowls of spaghetti for lunch by the catering team, the local Russian extras were being purposely excluded from it.
She was working on The Russia House, the first major Hollywood production to be shot extensively behind the Iron Curtain, starring international icon Sean Connery, yet there were workers going hungry on set. When it was explained to the Witches of Eastwick star why the extras weren’t being served lunch, her horror at the disconnect turned to fury. She was aghast to find out that there was a rule in the Soviet Union forbidding Western production companies from feeding the Soviet extras. So, she went on strike.
“In a country where you can’t get food, where you can’t get soap, here they were watching us shovelling down these platefuls of hot, steamy spaghetti,” she told Esquire. Astonished and infuriated, she made a big scene of walking off the set, letting anyone who would listen know that she wouldn’t return until the extras were fed just like the rest of the cast and crew.
Naturally, the leading lady’s stance caused a lot of panic at the studio, and soon Pfeiffer received a visit from members of the Soviet film commission. However, instead of telling her that the extras would be fed, they gave her a tougher pill to swallow: this was just how things worked in the Soviet Union, and there was no chance that any rules would be changed to accommodate one American actor.
“I didn’t sleep that night…It was very traumatic”.
Michelle Pfeiffer
In her distressed state, Pfeiffer thought back on her tough experiences shooting the movie in Moscow and Leningrad. Some of them were caused by the bitter climate, but most could be attributed to her exposure to how Soviet people were forced to live in the communist state.
“I understood for the first time in my life how people could just give up,” she confessed, “I was only in Russia for six weeks. But just getting from point A to point B was such an ordeal. Just to get home, you had to negotiate with the cab driver.”
To know she was powerless to stop government policy in a culture that was not her own affected her mental state greatly to pushing her to hopelessness. Her shift in outlook became so dramatic, in fact, that she wondered if she was being ridiculous in the first place for trying to enforce change, even with something as small as a bowl of spaghetti.
“I realised, ‘This is so typically American of you’,” she admitted with a sigh, “This is what, as a country, we’re accused of all the time. Now, whether I was right or wrong isn’t the issue. The issue was, ‘Do I have the right, as an outsider, to come in and force my sensibilities on this culture?’”
In the end, Pfeiffer’s political stand lasted only a day, didn’t effect any change whatsoever, and she returned to work the next morning. Ultimately, depending on how you look at it, the Batman Returns star was either resigned to the fact that she couldn’t change the laws as one outlaw woman or she felt she was wrong to even try to do it in the first place.
“At a certain point, I decided to leave my identity at the border,” she concluded, “At that point, I was able to experience the country as it was, on a purer level, and finally to even embrace it”. Is this a happy ending? Probably not. But maybe it’s about as happy an ending as the Soviet Union would allow.
