Brie Larson Calls Out 2 Sexist Female Roles That She’ll Never Do
Brie Larson wants screenwriters to do better.
On Sunday, The Hollywood Reporter published a roundtable discussion between Larson, Jennifer Aniston, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Sofía Vergara, Naomi Watts and Anna Sawai for its “Off Script” series, in which the dramatic actors spoke frankly about their careers.
Nearly 24 minutes into the discussion, THR executive editor, Lacy Rose, asked the women if there was any “role, or perhaps …triggering terms in character descriptions [in scripts] that make you all say, ‘Mm, no I’m not going to do this?’”
Larson had an immediate, knee-jerk reaction to the question.
“Broken, but beautiful or ‘beautiful, but she doesn’t know it,’” Larson said while lowering her head in mock-exhaustion.
“That one came so easily to you!” Rose remarked.
“I’ve read that so many times,” the “Lessons in Chemistry” star said. “I read that last week, probably.”
“‘Beautifull, but doesn’t know it,’” Larson repeated sarcastically. “But you’re telling me …it’s in the script.”
Later in the discussion, Foster pointed out that the “beautiful, but broken” description isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
“I don’t know that this is as true now as it was for most of my career, but I was always just shocked and amazed that so many of the scripts that I read, the entire motivation for the female character was that she had been traumatized by rape,” Foster said. “That it seemed to be the only motivation that male screenwriters could come up with for why women did things. … Rape or molestation seemed to be the one lurid, big, emotional backstory that they could understand in women.”
Larson and Foster aren’t the only people in the entertainment industry who have noticed these descriptions for female characters and find them concerning.
In 2016, a producer named Ross Putman was trying to find a new project and was reading through several scripts when he found himself getting annoyed by some very bothersome patterns in the way female characters were introduced in the scripts.
So, he decided to copy the descriptions verbatim — but switched all the characters’ names to simply “Jane” — and posted them on Twitter (which is now X).
JANE (late 20s) sits hunched over a microscope. She’s attractive, but too much of a professional to care about her appearance.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
JANE stands next to it (30's) dressed in a paramedic's uniform - blonde, fit, smokin' hot.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
His wife JANE is making dinner and watching CNN on a small TV. She was model pretty once, but living an actual life has taken its toll.
— Ross Putman (@femscriptintros) February 10, 2016
“Over time, I started to just notice that there were so many scripts engaging in this casual misogyny, so much that it wasn’t an outlier. It was a pattern,” Putman told HuffPost at the time. He went on to point out how introducing a woman as “attractive, intelligent” in a script comes off as “lazy” and “sexist.”
“First of all, she’s attractive first, intelligent second. Second of all, why do we need to say that? It doesn’t help you describe a character. It’s just vague, bad writing. But it’s also subtly sexist in a way that’s not appropriate,” Putnam said.
Putnam concluded that the only way to counter this is by having a “stronger base of women behind the camera.”
Kidman also pointed out during THR’s roundtable discussion that having women in positions of power in TV and film helped her add nuance to female characters with flat descriptions in scripts.
“I think now we’re all working hard to put women at the helm because then the viewpoint suddenly becomes very different,” Kidman said, noting that there’s “something incredibly freeing” when a female director has “incredible authority” on a project.
Kidman added, “You go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to step into line with [what you want] because you’ve got my back.’”