Ellen Burstyn only had one #MeToo moment in her entire career.
The Oscar-winning actress, 88, told The Post that she “was never treated badly. I can’t complain about that,” before recalling that actually, it happened once.
“I had an agent make a pass at me,” she said. “And I rejected him.”
Burstyn — whose new film, “Queen Bees,” a romantic comedy set in a retirement community, is out now — said that the agent told her that if she wanted to be represented by the agency he worked for she would have “to go to bed with [him].”
“I had just started [acting],” the “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” star said. “I had just made my Broadway debut and had made the change from modeling. And I said to him without thinking, ‘Well, there goes my career.’”
Obviously, she has no regrets.
“I think that it’s very important for women to learn how to deal with that,” she said. “I don’t think we have a lot of encouragement or a lot of instruction, how to respond to men. And I think now, that’s changing too.”
Despite being close to her 90th birthday, the Emmy and Tony winner is still busy acting. In “Queen Bees,” she plays an independent senior who temporarily moves into a nearby retirement community, where she encounters mean girls — the cast includes screen legend Ann-Margret and comedy star Jane Curtin — and even strikes up a romance with a fellow resident, played by James Caan.
It’s a delightfully gentle movie that Burstyn adores.
“It’s a movie about a retirement home that’s fun,” she said. “Since I was 50 I’ve been sent scripts whose plot is, how do we get grandma into the nursing home? And they’re always kind of unbearable places. So why on earth would grandma want to go into that nursing home?”
She loves that “Queen Bees” presents a different vision.
“This place was … beautiful and classy and had a wonderful swimming pool and garden,” she said of the real retirement home where they filmed. “And really nice restaurants with good food, and people were getting together and forming romances and they were having a really good time. So it made me happy to be able to present that kind of option.”
“Queen Bees” features a scene in which Burstyn’s character, named Helen, giddily smokes a joint — but that’s not something she does in real life anymore, she said.
“I did everything in my 20s and 30s,” she said. “And then one by one, I started giving things up. So first, I gave up cigarettes. And then I gave up heavy liquor. But, I’d still like wine for a while. And then finally I gave up wine [with] ice. And then the last thing was the occasional joint.”
Burstyn also admits that the “closest thing I’ve got” to romance right now is a new puppy, conceding that she doesn’t think she would even want to live with a man.
“You get to a point where you just — I had three husbands, you know? After a while, solitude is not so bad. So I wouldn’t say I’m looking,” she said.
As for her advice for budding thespians, The “Requiem for a Dream” star’s go-to wisdom is the well-worn adage: practice, practice, practice.
“Get in a good class, study with a good teacher, be acting all the time,” she said. “If you think about, say, a concert pianist, you wouldn’t only practice when you got a concert. And, you know, if you only act when you get an audition or you get a job, you’re not going to be in very good shape.”
For Burstyn, a little spot in New York City became her creative haven.
“The Actors Studio saved me,” she said of the famous acting school, which she joined in 1967 and now serves as its co-president with Alec Baldwin and Al Pacino. “You know, for years I was there … working on really hard material and staying in shape. So when I got an audition I was, you know, creatively fit.”