Imagine being severalize you ’re too honest-to-god to play the love life interest of a human 20 eld elderly THAN YOU .
Note: This post includes references to fat-shaming and anti-fatness that might be hard for some to read.
1.Just six weeks beforeSharon Stonewas cast inBasic Instinct— which would make her a sex symbol and household name — her manager told her she wasn’t getting roles because nobody thought she was sexy. “I wasn’t, as they liked to say in Hollywood at the time, ‘fuckable,'” Stonewrotein herautobiography.
2.Samantha Mortonalso claimedshe lost out on a role inThe Brothers Grimmbecause producers thought she was “unfuckable” — and thatHarvey Weinsteinhad apparentlyspecificallysaid, ‘Who’d fuck that?" There were alsoclaimsthat he said her upper arms were “too fat” (which he denied).
3.Amy Adamsclaimedthat she was fired fromDr. Vegasfor “not being sexy enough” to play Rob Lowe’s love interest, a claim Lowe echoed in his bookLove Life,adding that Adams wasn’t pretty “in a TV way.” Adams did clarify she wasn’t technically fired, but they “brought in a really tall blonde, and I knew.”
4.Fellow redheaded beautyJessica Chastainwas alsotold she wasn’t pretty enough to get roles in Hollywood. “Only in the past five years have people been telling me I’m attractive. Before then, I wasn’t getting parts because people kept telling me I wasn’t pretty enough,” she revealed. “People would tell me to dye my hair blonde when I first started auditioning. Funny how defined we are by how we present ourselves.”
5.Burt Reynolds claimed he had to fight for Sally Field to be cast alongside him inSmokey and the Banditbecause of her looks. “I wanted her really bad, but the filmmakers said, ‘Well, she’s not sexy,'” hetoldtheTodayshow.“And I said, ‘You don’t get it, talent is sexy.’ And she’s got that.”
6.Nia Vardalos’s first agenttold hershe was “wasn’t pretty enough to be a leading lady and not fat enough to be a character actor.” It was negative experiences like these that pushed her to write the megahitMy Big Fat Greek Wedding.“It hurt to be told that my ethnicity and my looks were the problem,” Vardalos said. “I never had my looks categorized as being detrimental to my career. So, anyway, f— her, because look how it turned out.”
7.Kristen Bell was similarlytoldafter auditions, “Well, you’re not pretty enough to play the pretty girl, but you’re not quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl.'” She found the feedback disheartening, saying it made her wonder if she could be an actor. Luckily, she feels that as she’s gotten older, “those boxes have changed and they’ve almost gone away.”
8.Early in her career, Kate Winsletwas toldshe should settle for “fat girl” roles, andher agentwas constantly asked about her weight. And after her breakout role inTitanic, she wassubjectto intense body-shaming that she later called “borderline abusive” and “straight-up cruel.”
9.Elle Fanning wasonce toldshe didn’t get a role because she was “unfuckable.” Fanning was 16, and the role was for the daughter in a father-daughter road trip comedy.
10.Gwyneth Paltrow wastoldby the studio that she wasn’t pretty enough to star inGolden Gateat age 20, despite the fact that director John Madden was interested in her for the role.
Hardin was replaced by Claudia Wells, who was 1 inch shorter, the same height as Fox.
12.Tiffany Haddishused to"accidentally” leave her purse (with her phone on inside, recording) in audition rooms so that she could hear what casting directors said about her and why she was rejected. Reasons included, “She is not as urban as I thought she would be,” “She’s so ghetto, I just can’t,” “Her boobs aren’t big enough,” and “I really think we should just go with a white girl. This role should be changed to white.”
13.Zoë Kravitz was similarly rejected for an audition forThe Dark Knight Risesbecause she was"too urban." Saying that it probably came from a casting director or their assistant and not Christopher Nolan himself, Kravitz expressed frustration. “Being a woman of color and being an actor, and being told at that time that I wasn’t able to read because of the color of my skin, and the word ‘urban’ being thrown around like that, that was what was really hard about that moment,” she said.
14.Rene Russo was cast inBatman Foreverwhen Michael Keaton was still set to play Batman — but when Val Kilmer replaced him, Russo wasfiredfor being “too old” to believably be Kilmer’s love interest. She is five years older than Kilmer (she’s three years younger than Keaton).
In Russo’s place, they cast Nicole Kidman, who is eight years younger than Kilmer. So…basically, a five-year-plus age difference between love interests was fine, as long as the woman was younger.
15.Elizabeth Banks wasdeemed too oldto play 18-year-old MJ inSpider-Man— which may have been fair enough, as Banks was 28…except that Tobey Maguire, who played Spider-Man, was only a bit over a year younger.
The role instead went to Kirsten Dunst, who is seven years younger than Maguire.
16.Nia Long waspassed overto play Alex inCharlie’s Angelsbecause she looked “too old” next to Drew Barrymore. She is four and a half years older than the 25-year-old, and less than two years older than the third star, Cameron Diaz.
She was replaced by Lucy Liu, who is two years OLDER than Long and over six years older than Barrymore.
17.Ashley Bensonsaidshe’s been told multiple times that she’s “too fat” for roles. “It’s come up a few times in the last few years, like, ‘You’re too fat for this.’ And I’m just sitting here like, ‘Wait, what? Do you want a skeleton?’ But I feel good. I don’t want to lose 20 pounds, because I don’t need to,” she said.
“I get told all the time to lose weight. I got that a month ago,” Benson, best known for starring inPretty Little Liars, continued. “It’s just weird. With my stuff recently, it’s been, ‘You have to be skin and bones or you’re not getting it.’”
18.Reese Witherspoon posted on Instagram that she was oncetoldshe was “too smart” to play the role of a young woman. She did not reveal the role or even her age at the time, but she finished the post by talking about crying in the shower in her 20s over lost roles, so we can assume it was around then.
She also shared in aninterviewhow studio heads associated her too much with herElectioncharacter, Tracy Flick, so her rep told her to “wear a sexy outfit” and “pretend not to be smart” next time she met with a studio head.
In fact, Witherspoonalmost lostout on the role of Elle inLegally Blondebecause “they thought [she] was a shrew" and “repellent.” She was again told to “dress sexy” for the studio head.*
19.At age 37, Maggie Gyllenhaalwas toldshe was “too old” to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man.
20.Similarly, Geena Davis was told she wastoo oldto play the love interest of a character 20 years older than she was.
21.And Olivia Wilde was interested in playing Naomi inThe Wolf of Wall Streetat age 29, but she wasalso toldshe was too old. This was opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, who was 37.
The role went to then-22-year-old Margot Robbie instead.
22.Jamie Denbo wasalso toldshe was “too old” to play the mother of an 18-year-old and the wife of a 57-year-old at age 43. This means that execs thought a 25-year-old — the age she would’ve had to be to have an 18-year-old at 43 — was too old to give birth.
23.Priyanka Chopra was rejected from a 2017 movie role because of her race. “I was out for a movie, and somebody [from the studio] called one of my agents and said, ‘She’s the wrong…’ ― what word did they use? — ‘physicality.’ So in my defense as an actor, I’m like, ‘Do I need to be skinnier? Do I need to get in shape? Do I need to have abs?’ Like, what does ‘wrong physicality’ mean?” ChopratoldInStyle, via HuffPost. “And then my agent broke it down for me. Like, ‘I think, Priy, they meant that they wanted someone who’s not brown.'”
24.Catherine Zeta-Joneswas toldshe was “too old” (at age 19) and “too pretty” for the lead role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical showAspects of Love. The lead was supposed to be 20.
25.The very day Rachel Brosnahan found out she’d been cast as the lead in the comedy seriesThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,she’d lost a role that morning fornot being"funny enough." This was something Brosnahan was told throughout her career.
26.Mindy Kalingwas toldthat not only was she not attractive enough to play herself in a sketch show, but she also wasn’t funny enough.
She then, of course, became a writer and an actor onThe Office, one of the most famous and successful comedies of all time.
27.Winona Ryderwas toldin the ’80s that she wasn’t attractive enough to be a star. In particular, at a specific audition, a casting directorstoppedher mid-sentence and told her, “You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don’t have it.”
28.Emma Thompsonsaysshe was deemed “not pretty enough” by male executives to do nude scenes, which lost her roles. “I have also never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked.”
Thompson was also originally consideredtoo oldto play Hugh Grant’s love interest inSense and Sensibility.She’s only a year older than he is.
29.Scarlett Johansson was judged “too sexy” to star inThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.In fact, director David Finchersaid, “Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I’m telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off.”
30.According to Kate Beckinsale, director Michael Bay didn’t think she was attractive enough for her role inPearl Harborbecause she “wasn’t blonde and [her] boobs weren’t bigger than [her] head.”
“I didn’t make sense to him as an attractive woman,” BeckinsaletoldYahoo Entertainment. “So there was a lot of panic and concern over, ‘How on earth are we gonna make her attractive?'” Beckinsale was put on an intense workout regimen and diet.
31.Minnie Driver almost didn’t star inGood Will Huntingbecause the producerdidn’t thinkshe was “hot enough.” Driver called it the rudest thing anyone had said to her in Hollywood — she laterrevealedthat it was Harvey Weinstein who said it. Luckily, writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as director Gus Van Sant, fought for her to get the role, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
32.Meryl Streep wasconsidered"too ugly" to star inKing Kong.Producer Dino De Laurentiis actually said, “Che brutta” (“How ugly”) in front of Streep when she came to audition — she understood Italian and fired back in the same language.
33.And finally, Viola Davis was told she wasn’t pretty or light-skinned enough numerous times throughout her career. Shedidn’t mentionspecific roles, but she did say the feedback was often in relation to romantic comedies. “A lot of it is based in race. It really is,” she said. “Let’s be honest: If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different. And if I had blonde hair, blue eyes, and even a wide nose, it would be even a little bit different than what it is now."
Davis continued, “We could talk about colorism, we could talk about race. It pisses me off, and it has broken my heart — on a number of projects, which I won’t name.” She has, however,spokenabout feedback from other actors that she “wasn’t pretty enough” to star inHow to Get Away With Murder.
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