Look: We have no evidence that Warner Bros. reserves promotional duties on the Harry Potter-related Fantastic Beasts franchise for whichever PR person has most recently pissed off studio executives. But you have to kind of assume, right?
This, in light of a new report from Rolling Stone that the studio has now become unofficially pretty nervous about the conduct of Fantastic Beasts and The Flash star Ezra Miller of late. Miller has been off the promotional tour for The Secrets Of Dumbledore—reportedly because Warner is saving their contractually mandated promo appearances for The Flash, out June 23—but that hasn’t stopped them from making headlines over the last few weeks.
We’re referring, of course, to a pair of incidents in Hawaii, in which Miller first allegedly harassed bar-goers for singing karaoke—eventually getting arrested by local cops—and then had a temporary restraining order filed against them by a couple who say the actor burst into their hotel room and threatened them. The Rolling Stone report compounds that with news that Miller apparently had “meltdowns” on the set of The Flash. “While the insider stresses there was no yelling or violent outbursts, they described Miller as ‘losing it.’ ‘Ezra would get a thought in [their] head and say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’’ the insider tells Rolling Stone.”
All of these factors reportedly led the studio to hold an “emergency meeting” on March 30, during which Warner Bros. executives decided to “pause” future developments on Miller’s projects. Which isn’t exactly what you want to be doing, when you’ve designated an actor as one of the key pillars propping up your ever-troubled superhero franchises, but so it goes.
Rolling Stone also highlights a few odd moments from the last few years of Miller’s career—most notably the fact that they held on to the crossbow from their breakout role in We Need To Talk About Kevin, and frequently offers to show it to people, and, of course, the never-really-explicated incident from 2020 in which footage showed someone who looked like them choking a woman in a bar in Iceland.