Richard Dreyfuss Under Fire for Alleged Sexist Rant at ‘Jaws’ Screening

During a Massachusetts holiday-weekend screening of Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss took the stage wearing a dress over his clothes and wielding his cane like a baseball bat before beginning a rant described by audience members as transphobic and sexist.

The 76-year-old actor, who starred in Jaws as oceanographer Matt Hooper, agreed to participate in an event called An Evening With Richard Dreyfuss + Jaws Screening at the Cabot theater in Beverly, Massachusetts. In video footage from the event, you can see the actor enter the theater to loud applause, wearing a blue maxidress over a blue oxford shirt, black pants, and brown baseball cap. He proceeds to showboat, to the audience’s apparent delight—pantomiming hitting a baseball with his cane—before two women rush onstage and remove his dress. Dreyfuss then puts on a white blazer that has been laid out on his chair onstage, and continues to dance a bit before sitting down to begin the conversation.

The bizarre behavior reportedly went from quirky to alarming when Dreyfuss began his Q&A. According to one attendee, Dreyfuss went “off the rails” when discussing his Nuts producer Barbra Streisand, calling her a “genius” before adding that women, as a group, “are so passive. That’s why the movie sucked.” According to the X user, Dreyfuss went on to discuss the #MeToo movement before he “started down the road of how you shouldn’t be listening to some 10-year-old who says they want to be a boy instead of a girl.”

“This was disgusting,” wrote one attendee on the Cabot’s Facebook page after the event, per Deadline. “How could the Cabot not have vetted his act better.” An X user named Rogue Mama also complained, posting, “Came here to see if Richard Dreyfuss had been cancelled tonight after appearing at #TheCabot in Beverly.”

The Cabot responded by issuing a lengthy apology to the attendees of the event, a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “We are aware of, and share serious concerns, following the recent event with Richard Dreyfuss prior to a screening of the film Jaws at The Cabot. The views expressed by Mr. Dreyfuss do not reflect the values of inclusivity and respect that we uphold as an organization. We deeply regret the distress that this has caused to many of our patrons.”

The apology continues: “We regret that an event that was meant to be a conversation to celebrate an iconic movie instead became a platform for political views. We take full responsibility for the oversight in not anticipating the direction of the conversation and for the discomfort it caused to many patrons.

Dreyfuss is no stranger to airing his opinions. Last year in an interview with PBS, he defended Laurence Olivier’s performance in the 1965 film Othello, which stars Olivier in blackface. And in an exclusive interview with Vanity Fair, he disparaged the Broadway production of The Shark Is Broken, which detailed alleged tension on the set of Jaws between him and his costars. “The problem is that they made my character the fool,” said Dreyfuss. “They didn’t do that to Roy [Scheider], and they didn’t do that to Robert [Shaw]. And that hurt because it wasn’t true.”

Vanity Fair has reached out to Dreyfuss for comment.