Why Sean Young left Hollywood: “It’s the city of devils”
In the 1980s, Sean Young was a household name. Movies like Stripes, Blade Runner, David Lynch’s Dune, and Wall Street made her a mainstream star, but by the mid-1990s, she had all but disappeared from Hollywood. For modern audiences, her role as the experimental replicant Rachael in Blade Runner has made her iconic, with her dark hair and sharp shoulder pads adding to the unforgettable retrofuturistic aesthetic of the film. There were several reasons for Young’s abrupt departure from the industry. It was a move that was at least partly of her own making, and it took years for her to shed light on why it happened.
Young was a ballet dancer before she started acting in her early twenties. She was just 22 when she was cast in the 1981 comedy Stripes, playing a military police officer who becomes romantically linked with Bill Murray and Harold Ramis’s character. A year later, she played Harrison Ford’s love interest in Blade Runner.
Things started to change in the late ‘80s when she developed the dreaded reputation of being ‘difficult.’ There were several high-profile incidents to back it up. The first came in 1989, when James Woods, who had starred with her in the 1988 film The Boost, sued her for harassment and stalking. The case was settled out of court, and Woods was forced to reimburse the actor for her legal fees, but the damage to her reputation was done.
In the early ‘90s, Young made headlines again for her unsuccessful attempt to win the role of Catwoman in Tim Burton’s 1992 film Batman Returns. Once filming had gotten underway, she crashed the Warner Bros. set wearing a homemade Catwoman costume. It didn’t go down well.
The final straw came when she was cast in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy as Tess Trueheart, only to be fired over ‘creative differences’ shortly thereafter. Young would later claim that Beatty had fired her because she turned down his sexual advances, though he has since denied that version of events.
When The New York Times caught up with Young in 2023, she was starring in a play about an ageing actor called Ode to the Spider Woman. When reflecting on her short career in Hollywood, Young was candid. When Woods sued her, she explained that she’d moved to Arizona. “I said, ‘You can all go fuck yourselves,’” she remembered. “So I created part of that cliff.”
Recalling the incident when she alleged that Beatty had forcibly kissed her, she said, “Several days after that, I get fired… That really was the definitive cliff. My joke now is I should have just said, ‘I’d love to fuck. I’m just busy right now.’”
When Entertainment Weekly did a profile on Young in 2008, she had a similarly sardonic take on the industry and her checkered experience with it. “The city of angels?” she said. “It’s the city of devils. The city of smiling cobras. This[town] eats venom for breakfast. Me, I just eat a nice breakfast.”
Although Young has made a few movies over the past three decades, they have mostly been small productions, along with a handful of guest appearances on television shows like ER and the soap opera The Young and the Restless. In 2017, she was credited as an acting coach for the actor who reprised her role in Blade Runner: 2049, though only archival footage of Young is shown in the film.
