Clayne Crawford is opening up. In May, the actor was fired from Lethal Weapon due to inappropriate on-set behavior. Following the firing, Variety published audio from set that broadcast a fight between Crawford and his costar Damon Wayans. Another video showed a very frustrated Crawford screaming at the assistant director about on-set commotion, getting extremely angry.
On Wednesday, August 29, Crawford, 40, joined the “Drinkin’ Bros” podcast to share his side of the story, claiming the incident that was reported – that he was yelling at children next to a pool – as a “blatant f—king lie.” He stated that they were taking eight hours to film a three-page scene and everyone was getting frustrated. He said he was yelling at the AD whose job it was to keep things quiet on set because he felt the entire thing felt “creatively disrespectful.”
“I snapped. Should I have gone to my trailer? 100 percent. Should I have just gone and waited? That’s what I was instructed to do when there was a problem — you go sit in your trailer and you lock your door and you take a nap,” he admitted. “Hollywood is very sensitive, so I should not have screamed and yelled, right, because it’s a bunch of very delicate flowers out there.”
He also said he wasn’t surprised the tapes were released, claiming the network had been using them against him.
“I knew that they were going to release these tapes because they’d been blackmailing me with them for months and months and months, the entire second season,” he alleged.”And I have all the text messages from these people and voicemails from these people saying, ‘Obviously you’re not the problem, but you’ve got to get ahead of this because you know they’re going to use those tapes against you.'”
As for the riff with 35-year-old Wayans, Crawford says he doesn’t at all “hate” his former costar, but they operated much differently. In one instance, he explained, Wayans showed up to a church to film a scene, then told everyone he couldn’t enter the church because he was a Jevoah’s Witness. Following their fight – and the audio that leaked – Crawford spoke to Warner Bros. Television boss Peter Roth.
“He said, ‘Clayne, I can’t promise you that I can save your job, but what I can tell you is that you have to make a public announcement apologizing, publicly, to Damon Wayans,’” the actor claimed. “I was like, ‘What the f—k, Peter, why would I apologize publicly because he and I had a riff on set?’ And he’s like, ‘Clayne, that statement alone tells me you don’t want to come back.'”
He added that the entire tapes weren’t played, and on them, he told Wayans that he could have been replaced by Kenan Thompson or Steve Harvey.
The actor didn’t expect to be fired – and if he was, he thought the network would call him.
“It’s a little different when you replace Becky or the mom off of Fresh Prince. Like, if they’d replaced the Fresh Prince, we’d have been like, ‘What the f—k are we watching anyway?’ That’s why I just didn’t think it was possible,” he said. He claims the network never called him to tell him he was let go. He learned the news on Twitter.
After his firing, the news broke that Seann William Scott would be joining the show as Murtagh’s new partner. While Crawford admitted he’s only heard great things about Scott, he did say he feels a bit like someone is sleeping with his wife and driving his truck.
Ultimately, he’s eager to move on – and has no plans to watch the new season of Lethal Weapon or any other content on Fox. “I’m not even gonna watch f—kin’ football on Thursday nights,” he said. “I won’t watch Fox for the simple fact that they made a statement, that ‘We didn’t have anything to do with this.’ I sent emails that going, ‘This s—t’s about to come down, we need to get in a room and we need to have a conversation.’ And nobody f—king returned my emails. No one called me.”
Lethal Weapon returns to Fox on Tuesday, September 25, at 9 p.m. ET.
