Emily Ratajkowski says she quit acting because 'Hollywood is f---ed up': 'I felt like a piece of meat'
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Emily Ratajkowski is opening up about her decision to quit acting, revealing that she got tired of making herself "digestible to powerful men in Hollywood."
In an in-depth interview with the Los Angeles Times published Thursday, the model, actress, and author recounts trying to prove she was a "serious actress with longevity" after landing her first major film role in 2014's Gone Girl, as a student having an affair with Ben Affleck's self-centered professor. Ratajkowski soon found, however, that Tinseltown wasn't for her.
"I didn't feel like, 'Oh, I'm an artist performing and this is my outlet,'" she said. "I felt like a piece of meat who people were judging, saying, 'Does she have anything else other than her [breasts]?'"
After Gone Girl, Ratajkowski went on to star opposite Zac Efron in We Are Your Friends and Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty, among other titles. Her most recent film was 2019's Lying and Stealing, and her last audition was for the role of Yaya in Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness, which went to the late Charlbi Dean.
Gotham/FilmMagic Emily Ratajkowski
In early 2020, Ratajkowski fired her acting agent and manager. "I didn't trust them," she said. "I was like, 'I can handle receiving phone calls. I'm gonna make these decisions. None of you have my best interest at heart. And you all hate women.'"
In an essay in her 2021 book My Body, Ratajkowski wrote about another incident that soured her perception of Hollywood: an industry party with her then-husband, Sean Bear-McClard, where his "clearly drunk" agent told her she was "like Pamela Anderson before the hep C."
"I thought about the way that [Bear-McClard] had glided through the room, a room full of men who only two years before had been kissing Harvey Weinstein's ring and encouraging their young female clients to take meetings with him in hotel rooms," Ratajkowski wrote. "I hated that my husband was at all connected to these men."
"Maybe that's why right now I'm not really interested in men's POVs," Ratajkowski told the Times. "Because they were lies. And I don't mean infidelity. This is a f---ed up world. Like, Hollywood is f---ed up. And it's dark… That was what that essay was about. I had a hard time even being at a party like that. But then having a part of me that was so connected to it was even harder."
Ratajkowski filed for divorce from Bear-McClard, a film producer known for Uncut Gems and Good Time, last year, after four years of marriage. Variety reported last month that Bear-McClard has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women; he declined to comment to the publication via a spokesperson.
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