11 times Hollywood actresses faced sexism in the industry

Jennifer Lawrence: The Oscar-winning actress may have won hearts starring in the ‘Hunger Games’ franchise but even her star power was unable to shield her from being singled out over her weight issues. “When I was much younger and starting out, I was told by producers of a film to lose 15 pounds in two weeks,” she told People at ELLE’s Women in Hollywood Awards. “One girl before me had already been fired for not losing enough weight fast enough. And, during this time, a female producer had me do a nude line-up with about five women who were much, much, thinner than me. We are stood side-by-side with only paste-ons on covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating line-up, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet. I asked to speak to a producer about the unrealistic diet regime and he responded by telling me he didn’t know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly [expletive]. I couldn’t have gotten a producer or a director or a studio head fired. I let myself be treated a certain way because I felt like I had to for my career.”

Reese Witherspoon: The ‘Big Little Lies’ star is one of the most powerful stars in Hollywood today, but despite an Oscar to her name, Witherspoon still found herself the subject of sexist remarks. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Witherspoon narrated a conversation she had with her financial adviser when she was 37-years-old. She stated her adviser told her: “You need to start saving right now, because you’re going to be making drastically less money in your 40s. Basically, you’re not going to have much of a career.” She fired the financial adviser and went on to talk about her how agents told her not to portray the role of a mother early on in her career over fears of her being typecast.

Rose McGowan: The actress and activist was one of the first celebrities to come forward and accuse disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. McGowan has spoken at great lengths over the abuse of power and sexism in Hollywood, channelling those experiences into her book ‘Brave’ out in 2018. In an excerpt published on i-D, McGowan addressed some of the ‘evil’ she faced in showbiz. “I was literally told I had to have long hair otherwise the men doing the hiring in Hollywood wouldn’t want to [expletive] me and if they didn’t want to [expletive] me, they wouldn’t hire me. I was told this by my female agent, which is tragic on many levels. So, so evil and so, so sad,” she wrote. McGowan continued, “Evil because I took the information from an older woman who was the mouthpiece for what Hollywood wants, and she was right. Sad because it wasn’t just the message that gets filtered down to women and girls, I got the direct message.”

Halle Berry: Despite winning an Oscar and surviving the entertainment business from a young age, Halle Berry still struggled on account of her gender and race. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Berry stated her background in modelling and beauty pageants kept her from being taken seriously. “It’s a hard nut to crack, this business, but that’s for anybody. It’s not for the weak or the meek. And it was hard for me. I started almost 25 years ago. Television was different, what women could and could not do was different. And being a person of colour, I was making a way out of no way. That was quite different than it is today for women of colour,” she said.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas: In a moment of honest reflection in her new memoir ‘Unfinished’, actress-producer Priyanka Chopra Jonas has spoken about an encounter with a filmmaker who wanted her to get plastic surgery ahead of her launch. According to an excerpt out in The Independent, Chopra Jonas narrated the incident, which occurred after her Miss World win in 2000. “After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him,” she wrote in her book. “I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt. If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed’, and he knew a great doctor in LA [Los Angeles] he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.” Chopra Jonas fired her manager soon after the incident.

Jennifer Lopez: She is one of the biggest entertainers in the world today, but that fame has also seen Jennifer Lopez deal with a certain bias that comes her way for being female and wielding such power. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016, Lopez spoke out against the ‘diva’ tag that she is often subjected to. “I’ve always been fascinated by how much more well behaved we have to be than men. I did get a moniker of being a diva, which I don’t deserve,” she said, adding that women in showbiz find themselves “labelled” after tasting success. “Or even sometimes I felt crippled to voice my opinion, especially because certain directors and the boys’ club that they form can make you feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t say anything.’ I was always fascinated by how I could see [a man] being late or being belligerent to a crew and it being totally acceptable; meanwhile, I’d show up 15 minutes late and be berated. And you watch this happen over and over and over again. Like, we’re not allowed to have certain opinions or even be passionate about something…”

Megan Fox: Last year, footage of Megan Fox talking about an audition with Michael Bay to be an extra on ‘Bad Boys II’ went viral, resulting in public outcry over what many deemed to be sexualised treatment of the teenaged actress at the time. In a 2009 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Fox recalls Bay approving her in a stars-and-stripes bikini, a red cowboy hat and six-inch heels when she was only 15 years old, as an extra in ‘Bad Boys II’. “They said, ‘Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand. So, his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall, getting soaking wet. I’m 15, I was in 10th grade. That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works,” said Fox. Kimmel was also under fire over his comments during the interview, where he responded: “Well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds works.”

While Fox later came out to clarify that Bay had in no way made her feel uncomfortable, in 2019 she did speak out about having a psychological breakdown after being sexualised in Hollywood. Fox said being objectified became a recurring theme in her career, and the marketing plan for ‘Jennifer’s Body’ was another instance of the problem. “It wasn’t just that movie, it was every day of my life, all the time, with every project I worked on and every producer I worked with. It preceded a breaking point for me,” Fox was quoted as saying to ET. “I think I had a genuine psychological breakdown where I wanted just nothing to do. I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to have to take a photo, do a magazine, walk a carpet, I didn’t want to be seen in public at all because the fear, and the belief, and the absolute certainty that I was going to be mocked, or spat at, or someone was going to yell at me, or people would stone me or savage me for just being out…so I went through a very dark moment after that.”

Emma Stone: She may have emerged as America’s Sweetheart with ‘La La Land’ to her credit, but the Oscar-winning actress still finds herself playing second fiddle to her make co-stars in Hollywood. During a December 2019 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Stone spoke about how some of her good jokes were taken from her and given to her male co-stars. “I hesitate to make it about being a woman, but there have been times when I’ve improvised, they’ve laughed at my joke and then given it to my male co-star. Given my joke away,” she said. “Or it’s been me saying, ‘I really don’t think this line is gonna work,’ and being told, ‘Just say it, just say it, if it doesn’t work we’ll cut it out’ — and they didn’t cut it out, and it really didn’t work!’”

Brie Larson: She may be Captain Marvel on screen but Brie Larson’s superpowers still don’t wield any pull for her in Hollywood. Speaking in the press room after bagging her first Academy Award win for her performance in ‘Room’, Larson opened up about the sexism she overcame along the way. “There were many times that I would go into auditions and the casting directors would say, ‘It’s really great, we love what you’re doing but we’d really love for you to come back in a jean miniskirt and high heels,’” she said. “There’s no reason for me to show up in a jean miniskirt and high heels other than the fact that you want to create this fantasy that you can reject. I personally always rejected that moment, I tried maybe once and it always made me feel terrible.”

Mila Kunis: Film and TV star Mila Kunis penned an open letter in 2016, in A Plus Magazine where she wrote about being “insulted, sidelined, paid less, creatively ignored, and otherwise diminished based on my gender.” Saying that she will not be “complicit” to this any longer, Kunis spoke up about having a producer threaten that she’d “never work in this town again” if she didn’t pose seminude on a men’s magazine. “I was livid, I felt objectified, and for the first time in my career, I said ‘no,’ and guess what? The world didn’t end. The film made a lot of money and I did work in this town again, and again, and again. What this producer may never realise is that he spoke aloud the exact fear every woman feels when confronted with gender bias in the workplace,” she wrote.

Meghan Markle: The Duchess of Sussex, who is currently expecting her second child with Prince Harry, quit the royal life after being subjected to media hounding that was called out by many for being ‘sexist’, ‘racist’ and ‘misogynistic’ in nature. Speaking out in the now famous ITV interview in 2019, Meghan revealed how the first year of marriage to Britain’s Prince Harry was difficult because of the pressure from Britain’s tabloid press. “I never thought this would be easy but I thought it would be fair. And that is the part that is hard to reconcile,” she said. “But [I] just take each day as it comes.” The pressure was aggravated by the fact that the duchess was a newly-wed, then pregnant and then a new mother. “Any woman, especially when they’re pregnant, you’re really vulnerable. And so that was made really challenging, and then when you have a newborn, you know?” she said, adding that it was a struggle. It wasn’t long after Archie’s birth that the former TV star and Prince Harry quit the royal life and moved to the US, away from the media and the limelight.