Cursed? Nah. Disrespectful? Looks that way.
Dylan O'Brien is the star of the
Maze Runner movies series and is currently making the media rounds to promote
Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, the second film of the series. He stopped morning talk show
Live with Kelly and Michael to discuss the film and told an adorable story about how they were allowed to film at a sacred Native American site in New Mexico, where filming had never been allowed. They were warned not to take anything from the site, but in the interview below, he says the film stars took items and later felt they were cursed when
several members of the cast became ill:
“Don’t take anything and respect the grounds. Don’t take any artifacts, rocks, skulls, anything like that,” he said on the Live With Kelly and Michael television show in September. “And everyone just takes stuff. Obviously.”
He acknowledged that he was “one of them,” meaning he also took something from the set, though he did not elaborate.
Within days, five of the cast members fell ill on the set, O’Brien said. “Random stuff. Random appendectomy. Random 105 fever. Random broken ankle. Crazy.”
Watch as he described what happened:
A viewer was upset by the revelations in the interview and started a petition calling for the cast and director to apologize and return any items which may have been taken. The petition already has 36,000 signatures:
In a disturbing interview on Live with Kelly & Michael, Dylan O'Brien admits that cast members of his film "Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" ignored instructions about filming on a Native American site and stole ancient Pueblo artifacts from a filming location outside Albuquerque.
The Native Americans from that area, the Pueblo people, have spoken out, angered and disrespected.
While O'Brien plays it for laughs, talking about bringing a Native American curse on the cast, his flip treatment of the crew's actions is outrageous. O'Brien, the film's director, and other crew members involved need to apologize to Pueblo tribal leaders for their behavior and return any artifacts they removed from the site.
The
Sante Fe New Mexican asked an
expert for her opinion:
“I do not think that there are curses, but I do think there are guilty consciences,” said Maxine McBrinn, curator of archaeology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. “People who do that often know they have done something wrong, and our conscience is designed to keep us from doing bad things. I suspect that if you know you have done something wrong and haven’t moved to make it right, then you probably are not in the best possible shape you can be in.”
As an archaeologist, McBrinn considers it a “bad thing” to remove such artifacts from their original sites. “When somebody picks something up from an archaeological site, all that information that the ‘something’ might have given us is gone. Where the object was found in association with other objects … has been destroyed. So you are destroying information when you do that.”
So, is the cast cursed? Probably not. Did they act in a disrespectful manner? Probably so.