Many of you may remember the stunning lead Nicole Behaire in Fox series Sleepy Hollow and wondered why she was later killed off in the season three finale. Well, the actress finally revealed why.
Behaire, who played the role of Abbie, says she was blacklisted after falling ill while on the production of Sleepy Hollow. The actress said she was labeled “difficult” and “problematic”.
“When you’re a person of color or a woman of any race, you can be labeled in a way that can change the trajectory of your life, health and career,” Behaire said. “For me, six years ago I was on a TV show. My co-star and I both got sick at the same time with the same illness and had different treatments.”
“He was allowed to go on leave for a month and I had to continue working,” Behaire said. “But, then I developed an autoimmune condition. I had C. difficile (short for Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes a range of symptoms affecting the colon) which had me on eight different prescription medications.”
Eventually, Sleepy Hollow ended after only four seasons. Behaire would find it hard to bounce back from the incident as word spread around town that she was difficult.
“There’s a lot of pressure in a situation like that where so many people are relying on you alone to get up and get going,” said Behaire. “I feel like it’s taken me the last few years to really see clearly that it wasn’t personal, it’s about the way that these structures are set up. It was very difficult to talk about at the time because I wanted to get back to work. But I was labeled as problematic and blacklisted by some people.”
You can watch Nicole as Turquoise Jones in her new film Miss Juneteenth, a single mom and former teen beauty queen who enters her daughter into the local Miss Juneteenth pageant. The film premiered at Sundance in January 2020 and was released via Video On Demand on June 19.
