Day: October 24, 2025

• Mickey Bergman, a seasoned hostage negotiator, highlights the dangers of acting on strong emotions.
• He says the fastest way to ruin a negotiation is to let your emotions get the best of you.
• One of his most memorable examples of a negotiation gone wrong isn’t his own, but one involving Serena Williams.

Whether you’re negotiating with a hostile regime or your neighbor, there’s one rule to always keep in mind, Mickey Bergman told Business Insider’s Maggie Cai in a recent interview.

Bergman has been a hostage negotiator for over 17 years and is CEO of Global Reach, a nonprofit established to bring home Americans being wrongfully held abroad.

His work includes direct negotiations with the captors, managing the relationship with the family of the captured, and negotiations with the US government.

“The role of emotional intelligence, to me, is the single most important thing that we have to keep in mind when we try to engage with people that disagree with us,” Bergman said, adding, “There is a very important rule in emotional intelligence that says only get angry with purpose.”

In other words, don’t let emotions get the best of you. That’s the fastest way to ruin a negotiation, he said.

How emotional hijacking works

Whenever you experience a strong emotion, such as anger, there’s a brief period of time between feeling the emotion and processing it rationally. If you act on that feeling before you process it, that’s called being emotionally hijacked, Bergman said.

“The worst thing you can do to screw up negotiations is to allow yourself to get emotionally hijacked, because that is often the fundamental reason why negotiations break down,” he said.

Bergman added that in many of his negotiations, people say things to try and trigger him, but he doesn’t jump to respond. “I don’t lose anything by not objecting,” he said, adding that he takes time to process the triggering information before replying.

That’s not to say Bergman doesn’t get emotional during negotiations. “You can get angry with purpose, but don’t do it out of emotional hijacking.”

How getting angry in negotiations can backfire

The best example Bergman has seen of emotional hijacking and emotional intelligence, in general, is actually not from one of his negotiations. It’s from the US Open in 2018, with Serena Williams in the final against Naomi Osaka.

It was the singles final in New York, and the umpire issued Serena a code violation for “coaching,” which means a player is seen getting coaching from the sidelines during a match.

Serena took the violation as a slight to her character. She got emotionally hijacked and yelled at the umpire for accusing her of cheating. She continued fighting and arguing with the umpire, who then gave her another violation for verbal abuse. Ultimately, Serena lost the match and lost the US Open.

“By the way, she was right in her argument,” Bergman said of the code violation for coaching. “But it was against her own interest. And that is such an example of emotional hijacking in which you act against your interest.”

Then, during the award ceremony, Serena Williams did the biggest emotional intelligence transformation Bergman said he’s ever seen:

The whole crowd of over 20,000 people was booing on Serena’s behalf because of what happened. Serena sees Naomi Osaka next to her, and she’s crying. Once Serena has the microphone, she addresses the audience, saying everybody should stop booing and start cheering.

“This is Serena Williams. After losing the final, turning to 20,000 people who were cheering for her and booing the institution to cheer for her opponent that won,” Bergman said, adding that it must have been a very hurtful moment for her.

“That to me is such a manifest, and I keep it in my head when I think about it. I keep it in my head when I teach. I use it a lot. That is how you either screw up negotiations or make negotiations work.”

• Emma Stone stars in “Bugonia,” a remake of a South Korean dark comedy.
• Stone plays a powerful young CEO who is kidnapped.
• Screenwriter Will Tracy told BI he originally wrote the character as a CEO in her 50s.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest movie would have looked a lot different if he hadn’t chosen to collaborate with Emma Stone.

In “Bugonia,” Stone plays fictional pharmaceutical company CEO Michelle Fuller, who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed beekeepers (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) who are convinced she’s an alien.

The colorful concept comes from the film’s source material — it’s loosely a remake of “Save the Green Planet!,” a 2003 South Korean dark comedy directed by Jang Joon-hwan — but in the development process, screenwriter Will Tracy (“Succession,” “The Menu”) ended up making a few big changes.

Producer Ari Aster (“Midsommar,” “Hereditary”) had suggested flipping the CEO’s gender from man to woman, and Tracy liked the idea. Then they made yet another change.

“When I first wrote the script, the character was supposed to be more in their 50s or older,” Tracy told Business Insider. “And then obviously that changed when Emma came on.”

Director Lanthimos signed on to the movie in the late summer of 2023, just before his movie “Poor Things” world premiered at the Venice Film Festival and went on to win four Oscars, including best actress for Stone. He brought on Stone, they tweaked the character, and the rest is history.

Lanthimos told Business Insider that he read the “Bugonia” script in one sitting and was hooked.

“I felt it was very funny and exciting and suspenseful and interesting and complex,” Lanthimos said. “I immediately sent the script to Emma, and we both decided that this is something that we want to get involved in.”

Tracy said he was drawn to pitting Stone’s Fuller, a savvy businesswoman accustomed to dealing with high-stress situations and navigating her way out of them, against Plemons’ Teddy, a passionate conspiracy theorist who will never budge on his beliefs.

“They are both being drawn out a bit in those conversations,” Tracy said. “She is someone who has a lot of power and masks her ruthlessness and agenda with a kind of smooth, frictionless, ostensibly liberal corporate optics, and he has convinced himself of a certain reality that informs his worldview.”

Looking back on it now, Tracy thinks having a younger CEO was the perfect choice for the story.

“It was quite interesting having a younger woman CEO who was that powerful and not Boomer age,” Tracy said. “A lot of the younger tech and biomedical CEOs these days do tend to be a little bit younger, so it actually made more sense for that world.”

“Bugonia” is now playing in select theaters and will begin its wide release on October 31.