Some Potential Backers of RBG Biopic Wanted to Rewrite Marty Ginsburg to Be a Total Dick 

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010, were known to have a loving and egalitarian marriage, one in which Martin—or Marty as he was known—was, in her words, her “best friend and biggest booster.” It’s a tender relationship that’s captured in On the Basis of Sex, the movie about RBG that came out this year. But for some potential backers of the movie, the idea that Marty could be such a decent man and husband was so perplexing that they wanted to rewrite his character in the movie to be a total dick.

Daniel Stiepleman, Marty’s nephew who wrote the screenplay, shared this anecdote with the New York Times:

To anyone who was around the Ginsburgs, their unusual parity was obvious. But to financiers and development executives, the character of Martin Ginsburg as a supportive husband was far-fetched. Backers offered to fund the film if he was rewritten as angrier, or less understanding; maybe he should threaten to divorce his wife, if she didn’t drop the case.

“It came up a lot,” Stiepleman said. “I remember at some point saying in a meeting, There’s a 5,000-year history of narrative, of men coming home from battle, and their wives patch them up and boost their egos and send them back out to fight again. You write one supportive husband, and everyone’s like, such a creature could never exist!”

Like the real-life Marty, Armie Hammer was happy to play a supporting role in the movie. “And I think that there is a lot to be gained from seeing that a man can be an even better and stronger man, while still being an incredibly supportive husband and a buttress for his wife,” Hammer told the Times. “It didn’t make him any less of a man. If anything, it made him more.”