TJ Miller Fires Back at ‘Silicon Valley’ Actress: “It Was Difficult to Work With Her”

TJ Miller is defending himself against his former Silicon Valley co-star who accused him of being a “bully and petulant brat” on the set of the HBO comedy.

The actor who rose to fame playing Erlich Bachman is addressing Alice Wetterlund’s allegations against him and the four other male stars of the series. Last month, Wetterlund — who played engineer Carla Walton for two seasons — called her experience on the show “kind of a nightmare,” adding that the other major male castmembers enabled Miller’s bullying and “can fuck off forever.”

When asked about the public feud on SiriusXM’s Jim Norton & Sam Roberts show, Miller denied Wetterlund’s accusations. “She may have had that experience, but it’s people trying to enter the headlines and get into the media cycle,” he said. “It was not my experience that anyone was bullying her or being mean to her.”

Not only did he claim he didn’t contribute to the toxic environment Wetterlund described, Miller went on to add that Wetterlund was the one who was “difficult to work with” on set. “Truthfully, I felt like it was difficult to work with her because she kept interrupting Zach Woods … during takes and even when she was off camera,” he said, reiterating that he didn’t think she was a victim of any bullying. “Obviously, there was some sort of disconnect because she’s saying these negative things about me and then attacking the mostly all-male cast of Silicon Valley.”

The comedian chalked up Wetterlund’s allegations to her simply seeking fame and piling on the negative news cycle. “It’s just a confusing time right now because there’s so much anger and they don’t know where to fire,” Miller said of the media. “I’ve been talking about the internet in general turning the world into high school, where gossip is immediately true. There’s no court of law … any time you get into the he-said-she-said stuff, you get into a difficult gray area because there’s no proof either way, but people love to bully and mob mentality is very easy to get into.”

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Miller also opened up about how he’s dealing with criticism in the press. “I guess by force I’m getting better at saying, ‘OK, these are completely untrue things being told about me. There are millions of people who absolutely believe these things — but there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t or don’t care or have tuned all of this out because so much of the media is … just all clickbait, anger, mean-spirited stuff,” he said. “The shows that I go to, all I get afterwards in terms of feedback is, ‘Thank you for coming and performing comedy.'”

The reason his reputation is as negative as it is, Miller claimed, is because no one speaks up about their positive experiences working with him. “If you talk to people who have worked with me, these people don’t suddenly break the news cycle by being like, ‘I just worked with TJ in Office Christmas Party and I thought it was a lovely experience,” he said. “Jen Aniston isn’t going to be like, ‘You know, there’s a lot of humility to him and we had a great time. I felt like I could trust him and we had excellent conversations in the trailer over Smart Water.’ That’s not going break the cycle. But Alice being like, ‘This guy is a piece of shit and everybody enabled him being a piece of shit…'”

The online vitriol is affecting Miller’s wife Kate Gorney, too. “Kate is at home reading this stuff and I’m at a point now where she’s like, ‘Don’t really mention me in social media because you get so much hatred coming at you,'” he explained. “To hear your own wife hear that she doesn’t want to be associated with you online, that was a pretty tough conversation and it made me very, very sad.”

When the Deadpool actor was asked at the end of the interview about being arrested in April for allegedly calling in a fake bomb threat on an Amtrak train, he initially said he couldn’t talk about the incident. But Miller then added, “It’s a misunderstanding that I have with the federal government, and that’s kind of the end of it.”

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