Former Girls Next Door star Holly Madison has entered the chat as Jessica Biel’s upcoming Playmates film continues to raise eyebrows.
“I can’t wait to see it,” Madison, 46, told TMZ on Saturday, October 10, sharing her support for Biel’s costar Lily-Rose Depp and the director and screenwriter, Lorraine Nicholson, amid the ongoing controversy surrounding the film and its subject matter.
In the upcoming coming-of-age movie, Elle (Indiana Elle) befriends Anna (Depp) as the duo vy to become the next Playmate of the Month for Playboy magazine. Lewis Pullman is set to star as the late magazine founder, Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017. Biel, 44, landed the role as a fictionalized version of Hefner’s wife. (Hefner was married to Mildred Williams from 1949 to 1959, to Kimberley Conrad from 1989 to 2010 and to Crystal Hefner from 2012 until his death.)
While Biel has not publicly addressed her involvement, her role has already drawn backlash from critics who argue the movie downplays some of the more serious allegations made against Hefner.
“Please reconsider playing Hugh Hefner’s ‘wife’ if this film intends to romanticize him or the Playboy world,” Crystal, 40, told Biel in a Thursday, October 8, social media post. “I was actually his wife, and I experienced sexual, emotional, financial and physical abuse in this relationship.”
Acknowledging other abuse allegations against Hugh, Crystal hoped the filmmakers made certain changes to the 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,” she said.
Crystal has previously been outspoken about her time in the Playboy Mansion, which she alleged was “traumatizing” in her 2024 memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself.
“Life in the mansion wasn’t the fairy tale I had once hoped it would be,” she wrote in one passage. “From the outside, sure, it had all the trappings of a fairy tale. But it wasn’t, and everyone who lived there knew it.”
Crystal later filed a complaint against the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation in February, expressing concern if Hugh’s explicit scrapbooks were to be made public.
“My focus is on how Hugh Hefner’s personal scrapbooks chronicle private moments that took place behind closed doors,” she said during a press conference at the time. “There are serious and unresolved concerns about the scope of what these books contain. The materials span decades, beginning in the 1960s, and may include images of girls who were underage at the time and could not consent to how their images would be retained or controlled.”
Madison, who famously dated Hugh during her tenure as a Playboy Bunny from 2001 to 2008, stressed to TMZ that she’s keeping an open mind about the project.
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