In a 2024 interview with IndieWire, Lohman revealed that she felt she “just kind of got pulled around and manipulated by so many acting coaches who didn’t have good intentions” when she was starting out in the industry. It’s not the first time she’s alluded to bad actors in Hollywood, either. In her THR profile from two years earlier, she complimented the creatives she’s worked with who don’t have any “ego,” shouting out Burton, Raimi, and Robin Williams along the way. She similarly mentioned that Ridley Scott trusted his actors on “Matchstick Men,” stating, “That’s what a good director does.”
In contrast, Lohman’s description of her work on “Where the Truth Lies,” an unrated noir-ish movie in which she plays a journalist in the ’70s who is manipulated by the men around her, is pretty telling. She called filmmaker Atom Eyogan “a great director,” but said that it “was one of the roles I probably shouldn’t have done.” She chalked the mistake up to her lack of understanding of the character from the beginning, and said that “even [Eyogan] got a little insecure with my abilities and that caused it to kind of snowball. He tried to save it and control it but the more you do that, the more it gets twisted.”
“Where the Truth Lies” is a pretty sordid movie, one that includes a scene where Colin Firth’s character gets Lohman’s reporter intoxicated and talks her into having sex with a woman to gain blackmail material. The film’s poster tellingly features the faces of stars Bacon and Firth, while the only woman we see (who, left ambiguous, could be either Lohman or Rachel Blanchard’s Maureen) is shown naked from behind as she looks up at the men. The reviews of the film were equally sexist; referencing a scene in which a character is found dead, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ruthe Stein wrote that Lohman was “so shrill and annoying as Karen that you end up wishing she were the one floating in that tub.”
Again, Lohman seemed to have no hard feelings about the film, but when asked about her takeaways from her time as an actor, she told THR, “I would make sure that whatever film I choose, that the character really resonated within me somewhere. And that the director had the confidence in me and trusted me with that role so that they wouldn’t feel the need to control it.”