I always want a challenge. My whole career has been based on trying to avoid female characters that don’t get to do anything. And it’s really hard to avoid those.
The ratio of male to female characters in movies has been exactly the same since 1946. So if you’ve ever had people say, you know, “It’s better now, it’s all changed, it’s all different,” it’s not, it hasn’t. Not yet.
There were so many women who had worked throughout the war in every possible job. They were told, “Now leave, so the men can come in” and there was this whole feminizing of women: You have to be very, very retiring and submissive and whatever.
I was lucky enough to be in some movies where I had powerful characters or I got to be the president on TV for a little while. Very short administration.
Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we’re portrayed in popular culture.
It’s partly because our culture so hyper-sexualizes females that if you don’t measure up to whatever we’re forced to think is the standard, then you feel inadequate.
I love theater. Just, it never spoke to me.
I think I always had joie de vivre. But I had pretty bad self-esteem growing up and much of my adult life.
I once read a quote that I think was Michelle Pfeiffer in an article, who said that she thought people went into acting because maybe if you could convince millions of people to like you, you will finally like yourself, approve of yourself. I don’t know if that may have been a part of it.
I’m not somebody who takes stuff home with them, that if I shoot a scene and I’m personally impacted for days or something. I mean it certainly is affecting and everything, but it doesn’t penetrate to some deeper layer. I’m in it when I’m in it.
When I was a model, actually, for a little while, my friend that I worked with a lot, she had horrible self-esteem too. We decided that the exact moment when we actually thought we were attractive, we wouldn’t be any more. We would just, like, miss it.
I had very, very bad self-esteem – that I was a fake, everybody was going to find out, that I didn’t deserve to have success, just about my looks and really, really bad self esteem.
I had a pretty poor self-image for a long time. I broke into acting as a model in New York. I was never anything like a “supermodel,” but I made a living at it for a couple years. The thing was, I was convinced that I was tricking everyone into thinking I was attractive.
I used to be very unathletic. I was always so gangly and self-conscious about my height. I had convinced myself I was uncoordinated. And as a result, I didn’t want to try stuff.
The most important thing is to change what children see from the beginning. To not create a problem we have to fix later.
I was tall from minute one. Always the tallest kid by a large margin. And my fantasy was to take up less space in the world.
I remember very distinctly being so tall I didn’t fit sleeves, so I ended up modeling lingerie and bathing suits, sleeveless stuff, basically. I didn’t have a good body, but I believed I knew how to stand or pose to mask it.
My theory of everything is that we are training kids to have gender bias against girls, therefore when you are an adult, you don’t see it. We think it’s normal.
Once I fix what kids watch, I’ll be moving on to everything else.
I immediately noticed there were far more male characters than female characters in the programs, even now, in the 21st century.
All I wanted, to be petite and attractive. I was afraid I’d never stop growing.