Anyone can have a momentary, mindless slip of the tongue.
But “rectal?”
Is this even normal?
Actress Diane Lane got awfully confused during a lengthy interview with Vanity Fair. The magazine interviewed her for her appearance in the final season of House of Cards. She’s a former school chum of Claire Underwood‘s, a star character played by Robin Wright. Kevin Spacey‘s character, Frank Underwood, was expunged due to his lengthy number of men who have accused him of sexual assault, harassment and attempted rape, which currently stands strong at 15.
His blistering character will be missed. Writers had to do something.
While plowing through chatter about women and the #MeToo moment, at one point, Lane jokingly says “me, also” when replying to a question.
But the showstopper happened during the Q & A portion of the interview when Lane was apparently kidnapped by a proctologist. The weirdest part of the whole thing is that she seems to not get that she just used the word “rectal” in place of a word that isn’t anything like that word.
It rhymes — I’ll give her that.
From Vanity Fair:
Interviewer: There are some fantastic interactions between your character and Claire Underwood. The repartee is like something out of an old movie.
Diane Lane: But we don’t [pass] the rectal test, right? Am I saying it right?
Interviewer: You mean Bechdel? Like Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel test [which looks at whether a movie, TV show, or book features at least two women talking to each other about something besides men]?
Diane Lane: Yes, that’s it. When the Bechdel test was first mentioned, I thought, yeah, what’s up with that? Why are guys always able to talk about whatever is going on in the story and then the ladies are coming on talking about the guys? I mean, it’s just dumb … we are playing history back now, looking at things differently.
Lane is famous for movies like Unfaithful, in which she sleeps with a man much younger than her husband, Richard Gere, who eventually blows up into a rage and murders her lover, Olivier Martinez, with a snow globe.
In 2004, she called the police on her then-husband Josh Brolin, who was arrested for domestic battery. Lane passed on pressing charges.
Lane’s politics lean left. She joined a climate protest in Washington in 2017. Her presence was overshadowed by Leonardo DiCaprio. Also in 2017: The Daily Mail called her “ageless” and featured her in a splashy story about how “sensational” she looks in a tiny bikini in Mexico.
As Vanity Fair‘s Tyler Coates wrote Monday night as he tweeted the “rectal” section of the story that did not have his byline, “I’m dying????”
As CNN President Jeff Zucker says, “Words matter.”