Ezra Miller, the actor best known for playing the DC superhero the Flash in several films for Warner, was set to start filming the studio’s latest entry in the “Harry Potter” franchise, in London when the shoot was halted on March 15, 2020, due to COVID.
Miller, who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, then became a regular at bars in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, where locals came to know and even befriend them.
Many recognized Miller from earliest breakout movies, 2012’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and 2011’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, where he played troubled teen who brought a bow and arrow to school and murdered his classmates.
Miller, then 27, also started to show volatile side to his personality — one that began to concern Icelanders.
But the next altercation, in which Miller assaulted young woman at the bar, was hard to discount. The incident got global headlines when footage of Miller placed the woman in chokehold and then pushed her to the ground went viral online in early April 2020.
Soon after the incident, the woman that Miller assaulted confirmed that her comments could be printed. She asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her privacy, as she’s telling her story publicly for the first time.
In the blurry video, Miller is seen confronting the woman–who is smiling as she walks toward them–and asking, “Do you want to fight? Is that what you do?” After Miller grabs her neck, she lets out an audible gasp. The person filming the video stopped to intervene.
According to three sources, the woman had been speaking to Miller at the bar prior to the quarrel. She inquired about the actor’s feet — visible in flip-flops — after noticing wounds, which Miller explained were battle scars from a fight. After discussing how they got them, she began to walk away, but turned around and joked, “But just so you know, I could take you in a fight.” Miller replied, “You really want to fight?” and the woman told them to meet her in the smoking area in two minutes.
Miller confronted her outside the bar. “I think it’s just fun and games — but then it wasn’t,” she said.
It’s a sentiment echoed by another woman, Nadia (she requested that only her first name be used), who alleges that after warm, two-year friendship with Miller, mostly via texts, the actor came to her Berlin apartment evening in February 2022 at her invitation. They hadn’t seen each other since their consensual sexual encounter in 2020. But after a friendly interaction, Miller’s mood sharply turned when she told him he couldn’t smoke inside her home.
“That just set them off,” Nadia said. “I asked them to leave about 20 times, maybe more. They started insulting me. I’m a ‘transphobic piece of shit.’ I’m a ‘Nazi.’ It became so, so stressful for me. They were going around my house, looking at everything, touching everything, spreading tobacco leaves on the floor. It felt disgusting and very intrusive.”
After pleading, Nadia said she finally convinced Miller to leave once she called the police. The incident left her deeply disturbed. While she is clear that she never felt at risk of sexual assault that night in her apartment, she believed the actor “could somehow attack me physically.”
Five people — two friends, a women’s rights advocate, a German social worker, and Nadia’s German lawyer —said that they spoke with Nadia soon after her alleged encounter with Miller and corroborated her account. In April, Nadia filed a criminal complaint about her experience, which Variety has confirmed with the German State Prosecutor’s Office in Berlin. While the prosecutor was investigating a charge of trespassing against Miller, their office says that it has discontinued its proceedings since the actor is no longer in Germany.
Just over a month after her alleged encounter with Miller, Nadia saw news reports that the actor had been arrested in Hawaii, for disorderly conduct and harassment, after another turbulent incident at a bar.
In May, TMZ released body-cam video of Miller’s arrest in Hawaii, in which the actor records much of the encounter for, they say, “NFT crypto art.” In the video, they also say a patron at a bar “declared himself as a Nazi,” and accused a police officer of touching their penis during a search.
Nadia realized she wasn’t alone in her experience with the actor. “It seems to be a pattern,” she said. “They jet-set abuse.”
After a second arrest in Hawaii in April, for second-degree assault after allegedly throwing a chair at a woman and leaving her with a cut on her forehead, the actor additionally has had two protection orders placed against them.
The first, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, was by parents of a now-18-year-old from the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota, who claim Miller manipulated their daughter when she was younger. The second was by parents of current 12-year-old in Massachusetts that involves an incident that occurred just days before their alleged confrontation with Nadia in Berlin.
The Daily Beast reported that Miller got into an aggressive confrontation with the Greenfield, Mass., family over the mother’s casual reference to “her tribe” and Miller’s claim that the board game Parcheesi appropriates Rastafarian culture.
At one point, Miller revealed a gun and said to a family member, “Talking like that could get you into a really serious situation.”
In June, a Rolling Stone alleged that Miller has been housing a mother and her three young children at their Vermont farm amid unsafe living conditions, with unsecured guns scattered around the property. (The mother told Rolling Stone that Miller helped her escape an abusive marriage.)
It’s unclear whether they will continue to perform as the Scarlet Speedster in future projects, but Warner Bros. is still committed to releasing its $200 million-budgeted tentpole “The Flash” in theaters in June 2023.
According to sources, the film costs too much for the studio to scrap entirely and reshoot with new actor in Miller’s role is similarly cost-prohibitive, because the actor is in every scene.
The film likely can’t generate the revenues needed to turn a profit without robust theatrical run, so putting the movie directly on HBO Max is unlikely.
