An attendee at Richard Dreyfuss’s question and answer session in Massachusetts over Memorial Day weekend told DailyMail.Com the Oscar-winner ‘kept going’ with homophobic and racist comments during his appearance.
Dreyfuss, 76, was attending the $300 per person showing of Jaws, the hit movie that began his legendary career in 1975, at The Cabot, a Beverley, Massachusetts, cinema.
The renowned actor took his opportunity to rail against the MeToo movement, transgender children, and the legendary Barbra Streisand after taking to the stage wearing a dress.
Kerry, one of the attendees, told DailyMail.com that she was visiting The Cabot with her sister as a birthday present.
‘He started the night by coming out in a dress and dancing to Taylor Swift, saying that this was an LGBTQ moment. I assumed he was horsing around; later, a staff member told me he was walking around town for a couple of hours picking one out,’ she said.
Kerry said that the show then got back on the rails with Dreyfuss discussing his role in another Steven Spielberg classic, 1978’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
From there, however, Kerry said Dreyfuss went off, targeting his Nuts co-star Barbra Streisand. ‘He began to say a lot of sexist things about her, about all women. They’re stupid, they shouldn’t have any power, etc.’ He continued.
Other accounts say that Dreyfuss accused women of being ‘passive’ which is why the 1987 film Nuts ‘sucked.’
‘Then he just kept going with homophobic and racist comments. He insulted the MeToo movement, etc.’
Another member of the crowd said Dreyfuss said that society, ‘Shouldn’t be listening to some 10-year-old who says they want to be a boy instead of a girl.’
Kerry said that the atmosphere in the theatre quickly soured, with many booing the star and some walking out. ‘Now, now, don’t turn into an angry mob,’ Dreyfuss told the crowd, according to Kerry.
Kerry alleged that an employee of The Cabot told her that staff had been told to prepare for Dreyfuss’s bizarre behaviour the night before a similar incident occurred at a similar event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
An attendee of that show was quoted by Deadline as saying: ‘I walked out tonight because of [Dreyfuss’s] small-minded, bigoted view of women and choice.’
At one point during his Cabot show, Dreyfuss said: ‘We’re so fragile that we can’t have our feelings hurt. We don’t know how to stand up and bop the bully in the face.’
‘There is a time and place for that stuff, most likely a Republican rally, but not at a Jaws event.’
‘He’s rich; entitled; he didn’t care about anyone but himself last night. It was never a discussion; it was him being ignorant and inappropriate. I expected better.’
‘Someone should ask Steven Spielberg what he thinks about Dreyfuss saying these things at a showing of his movie,’ Kerry added.
The attendee went on to say that she felt as though Dreyfuss was doing something for a book. ‘I felt he was conducting a warped social experiment to prove some points in his book. That we can’t disagree on things civilly, etc., that’s my opinion,’ Kerry said.
In 2022, Dreyfuss published his book One Thought Scares Me: We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them to Know; We Don’t Teach Our Children What We Don’t Wish Them to Know, which dealt with the subject of teaching civics in American schools.
The actor is passionate about the cause of civic education.
It is never appropriate to praise hate speech. Richard Dreyfuss displayed his ignorance and callousness.
Some might say that it’s not hate speech and that it’s only an opinion like it was only an opinion when Hitler persecuted the Jews – remember that Richard Dreyfuss?
Everybody is entitled to be what they want to be, and people who do not believe that being transgender or LGBTQ is natural, well, there are two types of male oysters, and one of them can change genders at will, and before man crawled out of the muck, maybe he had the same option. Maybe originally we were supposed to be able to switch genders, and being born with just one sex is a mutation. Clearly, Richard Dreyfuss was that mutation! And I welcome the bigoted man to say differently.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 