Crystal Harris, who was married to Hugh Hefner from 2012 until his death in 2017, has asked Jessica Biel to walk away from Playmates, the Searchlight Pictures film in which Biel plays a wife of the Playboy founder, and almost every report since has framed it as a widow against a movie star. The detail none of them carry is the one that changes the argument: the woman who wrote and is directing Playmates, Lorraine Nicholson, spent her own childhood at the Playboy Mansion, so this is really a dispute between two women who lived in that house and remember opposite things about it.
What Harris Asked For
Harris made her case in an Instagram message to Biel that she shared publicly on Thursday. “Please reconsider playing Hugh Hefner’s ‘wife’ if this film intends to romanticize him or the Playboy world,” she wrote. “I was actually his wife, and I experienced sexual, emotional, financial and physical abuse in that relationship.” She closed with a request aimed past Biel at the whole production: “I hope everyone involved in this film takes the time to listen to the women who lived it, before helping Hollywood turn it back into nostalgia.” Biel’s representatives had not responded to requests for comment by Friday morning.
Note the conditional. Harris did not say the film romanticizes Hefner. She said “if.” Nobody outside the production has seen a frame of it, and no release date has been announced.
She has standing to ask. Harris arrived at the Mansion in 2008 at 21, married Hefner in 2012 at 26, when he was 86, and was his wife until he died in 2017. In January 2024, writing as Crystal Hefner, she published a memoir called Only Say Good Things, and she has described the marriage in plain terms: “It was very traumatic. It was emotionally abusive. It was very restrictive.”
Who Biel Is Actually Playing
Biel’s character is not Harris. She is not any real person. When her casting was announced earlier this week, the coverage was explicit that Biel “isn’t playing any of Hefner’s actual wives”, because the character is invented. Bill Pullman plays Hefner. Lily-Rose Depp plays Anna, an aspiring Playmate. The lead is a 13-year-old named Elle.
That matters less than it seems. Hefner married three times, and a fictional wife of his still borrows from the real ones whether the script names them or not. And Harris has written an entire book about what that job was like.
The Director’s Mansion
Here is the part missing from the feud coverage. Playmates is Nicholson’s first feature. She is Jack Nicholson’s daughter, and her screenplay draws on her own upbringing: she “grew up at the Playboy Mansion,” as the coverage of Searchlight’s acquisition last month put it. The film follows Elle and Anna as they “try to help each other get what the other wants most, a magazine cover and a boy.”
Nicholson has talked about that childhood before. In a W magazine interview in March, she described the Mansion as “such a place of innocence, paradoxically,” and added a sentence that reads very differently after this week: “I was regularly swimming in the grotto. I didn’t know that the place had this other side by night.” In the mid-1990s she spent time there with Hefner’s young sons, Marston and Cooper.
Two caveats are worth stating, because the record supports only so much. First, the reports conflict: one casting write-up says the film “isn’t based on a true story,” while the acquisition announcement says it draws on Nicholson’s life. Both can be true of a fictionalized story, but nobody involved has said how close it sits to her memories. Second, nobody has said when the film is set.
Two Mansions, a Decade Apart
The dates still tell you something. Nicholson was born in 1990, so the Mansion of her memory is the 1990s one, when Hefner was married to his second wife, Kimberley Conrad, and raising two boys on the grounds. Harris walked in more than a decade later, into the era of multiple live-in girlfriends that she and others have since described in detail.
Same address, different house. One woman remembers a pool, a nanny and other kids. The other remembers a marriage she now calls abusive. Both are telling the truth about what they saw, and neither one saw all of it.
The Question Belongs to the Film
Our read: Harris is asking the right question of the wrong person. Biel is an actor taking a role in a director’s personal project. She did not write the Mansion, and walking away would not change what ends up on screen. The person who should answer Harris is Nicholson, and the studio behind her.
And Harris’s question deserves an answer, because Nicholson’s own words name the risk. A story told from a 13-year-old’s point of view is a daytime story by design. The child sees the grotto at noon. She does not see what Nicholson herself called “this other side by night,” which is the side Harris lived in for nearly a decade.
A coming-of-age film can still show it: through Anna, the aspiring Playmate, or through the wife Biel plays. If Playmates does that, it could be the first Mansion story that holds both memories at once.
If it does not, Harris will have been right on Thursday.
Searchlight should say which film it is making.