Kristen Bell, the lead in Netflix’s hit rom-com Nobody Wants This, seems like a pretty safe bet for studio execs nowadays.
After all, she’s had hit after hit in the likes of The Good Place, Frozen, Gossip Girl and countless others.
But speaking to Vanity Fair in 2020, the Golden Globe nominee revealed she got some pretty discouraging advice in the first few years of her career.
“I would get feedback from an audition like, ‘Well, you’re not pretty enough to play the pretty girl, but you’re not quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl,’” she said.
In the sit-down YouTube interview about her career, she continued: “I remember early on, getting feedback, that I was not enough in either category.”
“And I was like ‘Okay, so does that just mean like I can’t be an actor? What does that mean?’.”
Stating that she faced the same critique in “every single audition” while starting off, she later explained that she was “auditioning for anything [she] could get [her] hands on” when she landed her breakout 2004 role in Polish Wedding.
Fortunately, Kristen went on to say that she thinks Hollywood has improved somewhat over the years.
“It is not the 80s where you have to have the popular girl and then the nerd who gets the guy. It is not that anymore and I am really grateful for that,” she claimed.
“I think as I’ve grown older, those boxes have changed... and [have] almost gone away,” Kristen added.
“It’s this huge grey area now of all these beautiful stories you can tell... that have dimensional people that don’t have to be one thing.”
Kristen isn’t the only actor who’s admitted to getting some pretty shocking feedback about their looks or talent when they were first starting.
Meryl Streep also says she’d been called “ugly” by one director, while Nicole Kidman reckons she wasn’t considered “well-known” or “talented” enough for Julia Robert’s Notting Hill role (which she also auditioned for).
Meanwhile, Reese Witherspoon apparently almost didn’t land her role as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde because she was considered “repellent” following a previous role.
In other words, we don’t exactly think Hollywood is always right...