I was doing my daily casting submissions in the last days of 2015, and one breakdown caught my eye. It was one of those paragraph-long descriptions (which are never really necessary from a casting perspective, are they?)
The line that stopped me in my tracks was this:
“…attractive but she’s that classic actress type who would be so much hotter if her mouth was always duct-taped.”
Let’s move past that fact that I never, not in a million years, would submit to this casting. God knows where the audition would be, and what might go on during it. Think I’m being dramatic? Ask nearly any actress about her “worst” audition experience and I’ll bet you good money that it won’t be about forgetting her lines or feeling iffy about her choices. It’ll be about getting harassed or feeling scared.
The intensity of my reaction (which also involved a Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram rant…) came from something bigger. For some reason, that one little sentence brought up basically all of my negative feelings about this industry. About how I often feel like I’ll never succeed because I don’t look the way I need to in order to book this-or-that. Or feeling like the roles that are available to myself, as a woman, that I’d actually be proud to perform are so few and far between. About how my other female friends, who I think are so phenomenally talented, must feel the same way.
I never felt anything but beautiful before I moved to LA. I often do not feel beautiful now. I tie that entirely to my experience in this industry, to things people have said to me during auditions. To the way LA puts so much emphasis on looks. To the number of times I’ve stressed and pleaded with IMDb to remove my birth date because I’ve more than once not been taken on by a representative because they looked at my profile and realized I was “too old” (I’m not even that old. At all.)
The sentence I quoted above was some low level casting, obviously, but it speaks to the way women are treated in this industry. Try to imagine any other profession where this sort of job description would fly. That sentence has zilch to do with the character this team is trying to cast. It’s just straight up misogynistic.
There are real women reading these casting notices. We are affected by what we see every day, it is impossible not to be.
Even when breakdowns aren’t straight-up offensive, like the one above, they’re often still focused on attractiveness or sex appeal. This is problematic not just for actors reading for these roles, but also for all of the women who watch film and television. A recent video from Buzzfeed illustrates this better than I ever could:
I understand that casting directors are at the mercy of a lot of other people. They know networks want a certain look, and it is their job to find people that fit that aesthetic. But we’ve seen an increasing number of “alternative-looking” (typing that just made me cringe) women gracing film and television screens in recent years. Many of whom are popular entirely because they don’t fit that typical Hollywood mold.
What would happen if we started casting people with more weight on talent than looks?