17 Famous Women Who've Opened Up About The Truly Disgusting Treatment They've Gotten On Set And During Auditions
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1.Danielle Fishel shared that while working on Boy Meets World as a teenager, several men told her that they were counting down the days until she turned 18. She added, "I had a male executive — I did a calendar [shoot] at 16 — and he specifically told me he had a certain calendar month in his bedroom."
While she was taken aback by the comment at first, she originally thought it was okay and further explained, "because we are peers, and this is how you relate to peers."
2.Elle Fanning opened up about losing a role when she was 16 years old because someone involved with the movie said she was "unfuckable."
"It's so disgusting. There are so many stories like this that I've heard and talked to people about. I laugh at it now, I'm like, 'What a disgusting pig!'" she said. "I don’t feel like it damaged me, but it definitely made me very aware of myself."
3.Thandiwe Newton shared that a director actually filmed up her skirt during a callback. “A director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my tits and think about the guy making love to me in the scene," she said. "I thought, ‘Okay, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room, and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it." She later learned that director was showing his friends the video "and they would all get off on it."
4.Jennifer Lawrence once had to do a "nude line-up" with several other women who were "much, much thinner" than she was. Then a producer told her that she should use "naked photos of [herself] as inspiration for [her] diet."
"We are stood side-by-side with only tape on covering our privates,” she said.
5.Jennette McCurdy shared a story when a man who she refers to as "The Creator" pressured her to drink alcohol, even though she was only 18. While at dinner together, he told her "No one's looking, Jennette. You're fine...The Victorious kids get drunk together all the time. The iCarly kids are so wholesome. We need to give you guys a little edge." She did it to appease him.
Jennette went on to explain that during that same dinner, The Creator made her wear his coat and massaged her shoulders, even though the situation made her uncomfortable.
6.Amber Tamblyn was told by agents and directors that she needed to lose weight in order to be a star, which led her into some unhealthy eating habits. In an op-ed she wrote, "[A director] said the film studio would provide a trainer and a meal plan for me. I was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed just 120 pounds. I remember this number precisely because five pounds lighter would make me 115 pounds, which is the number I ended up achieving after I spent two weeks eating only the deli meat off Subway sandwiches and skipping dinners altogether."
7.Megan Fox appeared as an extra in Bad Boys II when she was 15 years old. In the movie, she wore a stars and stripes bikini along with a red cowboy hat. She added, “[The crew] said, you know, Michael [Bay, director], 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. At 15. I was in 10th grade. So that’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”
8.Gina Rodriguez was once asked to come back wearing a "black dress" after an audition because they "[needed] to know if [she was] pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine."
At the time, she said, "'That doesn’t make any sense for the character.' They were like, 'We need to know if you’re pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine.'"
9.Judi Dench was told during one of her first auditions that she had "every single thing wrong with her face" and wouldn't be cast in "any film" because of how she looked.
10.Sheryl Lee Ralph was fired from a TV pilot because a producer claimed she wasn't "Black enough."
"It was horrible. I can still remember the way I felt. ... People's thinking was not very inclusive [in the '80s]," she recalled. "You [had] directors who were still trying to tell you how to be Black."
11.Meryl Streep was told she wasn't "beautiful enough" to play Dwan in King Kong. During her audition, she overheard producer Dino De Laurentiis start speaking Italian and ask his son (who'd suggested her for the role), "Why do you bring me this ugly thing?" He didn't realize that Meryl could also understand the language.
On The Graham Norton Show, she said, "It was sobering as a young girl. So, I said to him [in Italian], 'I understand what you say. I'm sorry I'm not beautiful enough to be in King Kong.'"
12.Constance Wu shared her experiences of being harassed by a Fresh Off the Boat producer. "Nobody wanted you. I had to fight for you," he would tell her and allegedly urged her to fire her agent. In addition to controlling her at work, he allegedly touched her inappropriately during a Lakers game. When she decided she didn't want to put up with his behavior anymore, she was told that she would be "insulting the entire AAPI community with her behavior." She didn't come forward publicly about the situation until writing her memoir, Making a Scene.
13.Emmy Rossum was asked to show up to a director's office only wearing a bikini, because he wanted to see if she "was fat now."
During a roundtable with the Hollywood Reporter, she said, "My agent called me and was like, 'I’m so embarrassed to make this call, but there’s a big movie, and they’re going to offer it to you. They really love your work on [Shameless]. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There’s no audition. That’s all you have to do.' He wanted to know if I was fat now. That was basically the question. And I actually had this moment like, 'Well, how good is the part?' For a second, I was like, 'Would I do it? Send me the script. Maybe the character is in a bikini in the movie.' [She’s] not in a bikini in the movie."
14.Zoe Saldaña was once told by a producer, "I hired you to look good in your underwear holding a gun."
She said, "I was told walking into this project that they really wanted me for the part, and that any input or ideas I had to please share them. That's what I was doing, and this producer was so bothered by the fact that he had to disrupt his vacation to call me and tell me to stop being a difficult bitch. I thought, Wow, it's real. It really happens."
15.Lana Condor was once told to "be more like Hello Kitty" during an audition. "I just was like, 'I don’t know what you mean,'" she said. "I straight up — you kind of have to call that out. Also, Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth. [So, as] a woman, I’m like, 'You want me to be more like Hello Kitty, but she doesn’t have a voice.' That’s so insulting to me."
16.Kate Beckinsale was made to believe she wasn't attractive by Michael Bay, who directed her in Pearl Harbor. She explained that during interviews he'd say things like, "'I have worked with Ben [Affleck] before, and I love him, and Josh [Hartnett] is so manly and a wonderful actor.' Then, when he was asked about me, he’d say, 'Kate wasn’t so attractive that she would alienate the female audience.'"
She added, "I don’t think I fit the type of actress Michael Bay — the director — had met before. I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren’t bigger than my head, and I wasn’t blonde. I'd just had my daughter and had lost weight, but was told that if I got the part, I'd have to work out, and I just didn't understand why a 1940s nurse would do that."
17.And finally, Mila Kunis was told by a producer that "she'd never work in this town again," when she refused to pose "semi-naked on the cover of a men's magazine." She added, "I was no longer willing to subject myself to a naïve compromise that I had previously been willing to. 'I will never work in this town again?' I was livid, I felt objectified, and for the first time in my career, I said no."
