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24 Actors Who Were Rejected For Roles Because They Were Too “Ugly,” “Old,” “Shrewish,” “Urban,” Etc., That Prove Hollywood Is Still Super Sexist

Editor’s note: This post includes references to fat-shaming and anti-fatness that might be hard for some to read.

1. Gwyneth Paltrow was told by the studio that she wasn’t pretty enough to star in Golden Gate at age 20, despite the fact that director John Madden was interested in her for the role.

Rodin Eckenroth / Getty ImagesHardin called it “an interesting sign of the times that it was the female executives that felt like they had to be protecting the masculinity of their lead character that way,” calling losing the job “very, very painful” at the time.

Hardin was replaced by Claudia Wells, who was 1 inch shorter, the same height as Fox.

Universal / Courtesy Everett Collection

3. Tiffany Haddish used to “accidentally” leave her purse (with her phone on inside recording) in audition rooms so that she could hear what casting directors said about her and why she was rejected. Reasons included, “She is not as urban as I thought she would be,” “She’s so ghetto, I just can’t,” “Her boobs aren’t big enough,” and “I really think we should just go with a white girl. This role should be changed to white.”

Emma McIntyre / Getty Images for MTV

4. Zoë Kravitz was similarly rejected for an audition for The Dark Knight Rises because she was “too urban.” Saying that it probably came from a casting director or their assistant, and not Christopher Nolan himself, Kravitz expressed frustration. “Being a woman of color and being an actor, and being told at that time that I wasn’t able to read because of the color of my skin, and the word ‘urban’ being thrown around like that, that was what was really hard about that moment,” she said.

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The audition was apparently for a small part. Years later, Kravitz would star in the popular and critically acclaimed Batman film The Batman as Catwoman/Selina Kyle.

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5. Rene Russo was cast in Batman Forever when Michael Keaton was still set to play Batman — but when Val Kilmer replaced him, Russo was fired for being “too old” to believably be Kilmer’s love interest. She is five years older than Kilmer (she’s three years younger than Keaton).

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In Russo’s place, they cast Nicole Kidman, who is eight years younger than Kilmer. So…basically, a five-plus age difference between love interests was fine, as long as the woman was younger.

Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

6. Elizabeth Banks was deemed too old to play 18-year-old MJ in Spider-Man — which may have been fair enough, as Banks was 28…except that Tobey Maguire, who played Spider-Man, was only a bit over a year younger.

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The role instead went to Kirsten Dunst, who is seven years younger than Maguire.

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7. Nia Long was passed over to play Alex in Charlie’s Angels because she looked “too old” next to Drew Barrymore. She is four and a half years older than the 25-year-old, and less than two years older than the third star, Cameron Diaz.

Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

She was replaced by Lucy Liu, who is two years OLDER than Long and over six years older than Barrymore.

Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

8. Ashley Benson said she’s been told multiple times that she’s “too fat” for roles. “It’s come up a few times in the last few years, like, ‘You’re too fat for this.’ And I’m just sitting here like, ‘Wait, what? Do you want a skeleton?’ But I feel good. I don’t want to lose 20 pounds, because I don’t need to,” she said.

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“I get told all the time to lose weight. I got that a month ago,” Benson, best known for starring in Pretty Little Liars, continued. “It’s just weird. With my stuff recently, it’s been, ‘You have to be skin and bones or you’re not getting it.’”

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9. Reese Witherspoon posted on Instagram that she was once told she was “too smart” to play the role of a young woman. She did not reveal the role or even her age at the time, but she finished the post by talking about crying in the shower in her 20s over lost roles, so we can assume it was around then.

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter

She also shared in an interview how studio heads associated her too much with her Election character Tracy Flick, so her rep told her to “wear a sexy outfit” and “pretend not to be smart” next time she met with a studio head.

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In fact, Witherspoon almost lost out on the role of Elle in Legally Blonde because “they thought [she] was a shrew” and “repellent.” She was again told to “dress sexy” for the studio head.*

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*It’s unclear if this is all the same experience from her audition process for Legally Blonde or if this was a phenomenon that happened multiple times. 

10. At age 37, Maggie Gyllenhaal was told she was “too old” to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man.

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11. Similarly, Geena Davis was told she was too old to play the love interest of a character 20 years older than she was.

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Davis did not specify when this was.

12. And Olivia Wilde was interested in playing Naomi in The Wolf of Wall Street at age 29, but she was also told she was too old. This was opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, who was 37.

Gregg DeGuire / WireImage via Getty Images

The role went to then-22-year-old Margot Robbie instead.

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13. Jamie Denbo was also told she was “too old” to play the mother of an 18-year-old and the wife of a 57-year-old at age 43. This means that execs thought a 25-year-old — the age she would’ve had to be to have an 18-year-old at 43 — was too old to give birth.

Jesse Grant / Getty Images for A+E Networks/Lifetime

14. Priyanka Chopra was rejected from a 2017 movie role because of her race. “I was out for a movie, and somebody [from the studio] called one of my agents and said, ‘She’s the wrong…’ ― what word did they use? — ‘physicality.’ So in my defense as an actor, I’m like, ‘Do I need to be skinnier? Do I need to get in shape? Do I need to have abs?’ Like, what does ‘wrong physicality’ mean?” Chopra told InStyle. “And then my agent broke it down for me. Like, ‘I think, Priy, they meant that they wanted someone who’s not brown.'”

Emma McIntyre / Getty Images

15. Catherine Zeta-Jones was told she was “too old” (at age 19) and “too pretty” for the lead role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatrical show Aspects of Love. The lead was supposed to be 20.

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“I wasn’t even 20, and I remember telling him I could be as not pretty or as not old as he wanted, but it didn’t do any good.”

16. The very day Rachel Brosnahan found out she’d been cast as the lead in the comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she’d lost a role that morning for not being “funny enough.” This was something Brosnahan was told throughout her career.

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17. Mindy Kaling was told that not only was she not attractive enough to play herself in a sketch show, but she also wasn’t funny enough.

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She then, of course, became a writer and an actor on The Office, one of the most famous and successful comedies of all time.

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18. Winona Ryder was told she wasn’t attractive enough to be a star in the ’80s. In particular, at a specific audition, a casting director stopped her mid-sentence and told her, “You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don’t have it.”

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“She was very blunt — I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor,” Ryder said of the casting director at the unnamed audition.

19. Emma Thompson says she was deemed “not pretty enough” by male executives to do nude scenes, which lost her roles. “I have also never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked.”

Mark Sagliocco / WireImage via Getty Images

Thompson was also originally considered too old to play Hugh Grant’s love interest in Sense and Sensibility. She’s only a year older than he is.

Columbia Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

20. Scarlett Johansson was “too sexy” to star in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In fact, director David Fincher said, “Scarlett Johansson was great. It was a great audition, I’m telling you. But the thing with Scarlett is, you can’t wait for her to take her clothes off.”

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The role went to Rooney Mara instead.

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21. According to Kate Beckinsale, director Michael Bay didn’t think she was attractive enough for her role in Pearl Harbor because she “wasn’t blonde and [her] boobs weren’t bigger than [her] head.”

Touchstone Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

“I didn’t make sense to him as an attractive woman,” Beckinsale told Yahoo Entertainment. “So there was a lot of panic and concern over, ‘How on earth are we gonna make her attractive?'” Beckinsale was put on an intense workout regimen and diet.

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22. Minnie Driver almost didn’t star in Good Will Hunting because the producer didn’t think she was “hot enough.” Driver called it the rudest thing anyone had said to her in Hollywood — she later revealed that it was Harvey Weinstein who said it. Luckily, writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as director Gus Van Sant, fought for her to get the role, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

George Kraychyk / Miramax / Courtesy Everett Collection

23. Meryl Streep was considered “too ugly” to star in King Kong. Producer Dino De Laurentiis actually said, “Che brutta” (“How ugly”) in front of Streep when she came to audition — she understood and fired back in Italian.

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The part went to Jessica Lange instead.

Paramount Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection

24. And finally, Viola Davis was told she wasn’t pretty or light-skinned enough numerous times throughout her career. She didn’t mention specific roles, but she did say the feedback was often in relation to romantic comedies. “A lot of it is based in race. It really is,” she said. “Let’s be honest: If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different. And if I had blonde hair, blue eyes, and even a wide nose, it would be even a little bit different than what it is now.”

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Davis continued, “We could talk about colorism, we could talk about race. It pisses me off, and it has broken my heart — on a number of projects, which I won’t name.” She has, however, spoken about feedback from other actors that she “wasn’t pretty enough” to star in How to Get Away With Murder.

Mitchell Haaseth / ABC / Courtesy Everett Collection

The National Eating Disorders Association helpline is 1-800-931-2237; for 24/7 crisis support, text “NEDA” to 741741.