While promoting her new Netflix movie, 'Miss Juneteeth' Nicole explains how badly she was treated on the set of Sleepy Hollow...
"When you're a person of color or a woman of any race, you can be labeled in a way that can change the trajectory of your life, health and career. For me, six years ago I was on a TV show. My co-star and I both got sick at the same time with the same illness and had different treatments. He was allowed to go on leave for a month and I had to continue working. There was a smokescreen of me getting my own episode titled 'Mama.' By the end of that episode, I started to fall apart."
"They shut down production for two weeks because I got sick. They sent in lots of doctors, and I had daily checkups to make sure I was actually sick because they had to get the production going. Every doctor said I wasn't doing well and that I needed to rest. That is not what they wanted to hear. Months ensued and I got a lawyer. I got my hours down and worked through it. But then I developed an autoimmune condition. I had C. difficile [a bacterium that causes a range of symptoms], which had me on eight different prescription medications."
"My costar and I were both sick at the same time but I don't believe that we were treated equally. He was allowed to go back to England for a month [to recover while] I was given Episode 9 to shoot on my own. So I pushed through it and then by the end of that episode I was in urgent care. And all the doctors, including the doctors that the studio was sending, were all confirming, ‘Hey, she can't work right now.'"
"There's a lot of pressure in a situation like that where so many people are relying on you alone to get up and get going. I feel like it's taken me the last few years to really see clearly that it wasn't personal, it's about the way that these structures are set up. It was very difficult to talk about at the time because I wanted to get back to work. But I was labeled as problematic and blacklisted by some people."
