Mercedes Blanche can’t name a favourite film.
The men who starred in them have all been in her DMs.
The Hungarian-Canadian actor and comedian, who played X-Ray in season three of The Boys, says famous men have asked her for “favours” in exchange for work.
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She spent years assuming she was the one getting it wrong.
The DMs that ruined her favourite films
“Someone recently asked me what my favourite movie was and I had a hard time naming one because all the people from my favourite movies have been in my DMs trying to hit me up, or telling me to do things that I didn’t want to do,” she says.
“There aren’t many male names that I look up to because they’ve just ruined it for me.”
She names nobody. What surprises her is how little the men appear to weigh the risk.
“I’ve had very famous people shoot their shot and harass me, and I’m always surprised that they aren’t afraid I’m going to post about them. But they’re on a different level, they don’t care.”
‘Favours’ for stage time
Blanche left Hungary for Canada at 16 and later settled in Los Angeles, building an audience of more than two million on Instagram off dad jokes and one-liners.
Comedy rooms, she says, were the harder of her two industries.
“I’ve been exposed to men in this field who feel they are in power and have asked me to do ‘favours’ in order to book jobs or get more visibility on stage.”
Pay. Stage time. Who gets booked at all.
“Women are constantly being put down and not acknowledged in this industry at all.
Whether it’s pay or stage time, I’m just seeing a lack of female representation.”
She has occasionally said something publicly.
“I’ve called a few people out on my social media. I’m very vocal about women being heard.”
Thirty men and one topless scene
Her first significant screen job required her to be topless.
“Almost everyone on set was lovely but my role was a topless scene and there were uncomfortable moments where I could hear crude comments coming from crew members,” she says.
“That was the very first lesson for me – that I must smile and just shut up.”
She counted the room.
“I was so afraid to speak up so I kept smiling. There were 30 male cameramen and crew and it was my first gig. I just didn’t want to blow it.”
For a long time afterwards she interrogated herself rather than them.
“I was overthinking it all – am I the drama? Am I the problem? Is this really appropriate?”
“I thought maybe I was the problem, but now that I’m older, I realise I was never the problem.”
What Hayden Panettiere’s death set off
Blanche is talking now because of a death three weeks ago.
Emergency responders found Hayden Panettiere unresponsive at an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, on 16 August.
Medics could not revive her.
She was 36. The Greenville County Coroner’s Office found no signs of trauma that contributed to her death and her cause of death remains pending, with city police leading an investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration assisting.
Blanche reads it as a warning the industry has already ignored several times.
“We recently lost Hayden Panettiere and when someone is struggling in Hollywood there are always signs,” she says.
“Hayden’s death shows why mental health and issues for women in this industry need to be talked about.
It has happened so many times before and people just move on and don’t listen.”
“Hollywood is hard and it’s not for everyone.”
What she wants is company. “I feel like if I speak up, I might start a chain reaction where other people will come out and talk too, because it’s just constant sexual harassment and being desired. We’re just seen as objects.”
Her own set, her own rules
She has launched a production company and is producing a horror comedy, NeuroDieVirgin.
“It gives me a good ground to create a safe space for other females and lets me provide a set where none of what happened to me, and is still happening, will affect them.”
Why It Matters
Blanche has two million followers and her own camera.
She still spent her first professional job smiling at comments she didn’t want to hear.
For creators crossing from their own platforms into film and television, that’s the part worth reading twice: reach doesn’t transfer as protection.
On someone else’s set, nobody is watching for you.
Nine years after Weinstein, the sharpest accounts of harassment in entertainment increasingly come from people with their own distribution, who don’t need a publicist’s approval to publish.
The industry’s answer to that shift has mostly been to hope it stays quiet.
Whether NeuroDieVirgin gets made is one question.
Whether the chain reaction Blanche wants actually starts is another, and it depends on people with considerably more to lose than she has.
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