Photo-illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
Crystal Harris, Hugh Hefner’s widow, asked Jessica Biel to ‘reconsider’ playing a fictionalized version of the Playboy the founder’s wife in the next film Playmates. Following reports of Biel’s casting earlier this week, Harris appears to have sent the actress a message on Instagram, telling her that she should not participate in the project if it intended to “romanticize” Hefner or Playboy.
“I was actually his wife and suffered sexual, emotional, financial and physical abuse in that relationship,” Harris wrote in a DM to Biel, which she screenshotted and shared on her own profile. “Numerous other women have also come forward with allegations of rape, coercion, drugging and exploitation. There are also deeply troubling concerns regarding minors.” Harris added that she hopes “everyone involved in this film takes the time to listen to the women who lived it before helping Hollywood turn it into nostalgia again.”
Biel does not play Harris or any of Hefner’s other two wives, Mildred Williams and Kimberley Conrad. She will play a made-up version of Hefner’s wife, who was herself a Playmate at one point. A representative for Biel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Playmates is expected to be the directorial debut of Lorraine Nicholson, the daughter of Jack Nicholson, who also wrote the screenplay. The film revolves around a 13-year-old girl who “considers the Playboy mansion her second home” and forms “an unlikely friendship” with a woman named Anna, who is vying to become Playmate of the Month. Bill Pullman will play Hefner and Lily-Rose Depp will play Anna. In 2024, Nicholson published an article in Vanity Fair about spending her childhood at the Playboy Mansion, a place where she felt “safe and free.”
Harris married Hefner in 2012, when she was 26 and he was 86. They remained married until his death in 2017. In 2024, she published the memoir Say Only Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myselfin which she detailed the abuse she suffered while in a relationship with Hefner. In an interview with The Guardian Before the book’s release, she said she had engaged in sexual acts with Hefner that she “wasn’t comfortable with” and that she felt “imprisoned” in the Playboy mansion.
“Power is insidious when it is masked as generosity, and generosity is insidious when it is used to camouflage control,” she writes of Hefner in the book. “And power and generosity are confusing when they make you think they might be love.”
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