Queen, cult actress, and feminist icon Rose McGowan is an essential voice for women in Hollywood right now. Just last month, the actress posted a tweet with a casting note for an upcoming Adam Sandler movie which came with this wardrobe requirement: "[...] shows off cleavage (push up bras encouraged)." Ah yes, isn't the male gaze lovely? But because we live in a shit world and Hollywood is still terrible to women, McGowan was shortly fired from her agent for pushing against the patriarchy.
casting note that came w/script I got today. For real. name of male star rhymes with Madam Panhandler hahahaha I die pic.twitter.com/lCWGTV537t
I just got fired by my wussy acting agent because I spoke up about the bullshit in Hollywood. Hahaha. #douchebags #awesome #BRINGIT
Today, Indiewire posted a podcast interview with the actor-slash-filmmaker as a part of their Indiewire Influencers series. As expected, it is amazing. Rose McGowan speaks candidly—whilst dropping many, many F-bombs—about what it was like getting fired and how terrible the industry really is to women. She says Hollywood is "a bunch of old white men trying to hold on to their power" and like a "patriarchal 'Daddy's mad' situation" that makes women "be in fear of the men in power and what they can do."
On the Adam Sandler film casting situation, she says that the role is supposed to be for a hot supermodel type who chases after Sandler's character. She adds, "If I'm gonna go out with someone fucking ugly, I'm gonna do it on my own goddamn time." OH DAMN. BURN. In the immensely eye-opening and entertaining take-no-prisoners interview, she also talks about on-set disrespect ("I've been screamed at, yelled at, had things thrown at me") and double standards. Now that she's also a director (with her debut short Dawn and now The Pines), she's been getting a lot of reactions like "We're so surprised she had it in her!"—which isn't how, say, Ryan Gosling is being talked about for Lost River. (Side note: Maybe that's because Lost River is a bad movie?? Yeah, I said it.)
It's noteworthy when a woman is so transparent about these issues (which is understandably harder for newer actresses), and so unapologetic about it, too. "I am threatening. I should be threatening. Why not?" McGowan adds. Bow fuckin' down. This interview is giving me SO. MUCH. LIFE.
In related news, Emma Thompson also spoke out about Hollywood's sexism to U.K. pubRadioTimes yesterday, saying, "I think it's still completely shit actually. I don't think there's any appreciable improvement and I think that for women, the question of how they are supposed to look is worse than it was even when I was young." The 56-year-old plays a 77-year-old in upcoming film The Legend of Barney Thompson. ("It would be really nice to get someone who is actually 77 to play her, but it’s a wildly comic role and I couldn’t resist," she notes.) She also says, "I get behind as many young female performers as I can and actually a lot of the conversations I have with them are about exactly the fact that we are facing and writing about the same things and nothing has changed, and that some forms of sexism and unpleasantness to women have become more entrenched and indeed more prevalent."
PRAISE HANDS EMOJIS TO YOU LADIES.
