Anna Kendrick has been making quite a name for herself in recent years. Her role as Beca Mitchell in the Pitch Perfect franchise is reason enough to be impressed, but her impressive resume goes way beyond that.
While Kendrick is a brilliant actress, she’s also incredibly relatable and downright hilarious, which makes us love her even more.
Recently, Anna Kendrick talked about gender equality at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2016, where she expressed her thoughts about women being pressured to look pretty.
“There’s a pressure [on women] to be pretty when you’re an actor,” she said. “And I think that’s something that contributes to the lack of female directors because women feel like they have to choose between being pretty and being smart.”
As Anna Kendrick recently discussed in this blog, there is a lot of pressure on women in Hollywood to be pretty.
“I definitely feel pressure to be pretty or beautiful on screen because those are the roles that are available to me,” the actress wrote. “There’s no point in fighting it and there’s no point in whining about it.”
The Pitch Perfect star has taken on a wide range of projects since she started acting in 1998, and she has certainly seen her fair share of inequality. In a recent interview with Glamour magazine, the actress talked about gender equality and the pressure to be pretty.
“I’ve been in this business for 20 years, and my dad’s a history professor, and if you talk to anybody who studies history, they’ll tell you that we’re still living in the 1950s. It’s insane,” she said.
Kendrick also shared that she felt pressure to look a certain way during her time as a teen actress, something she doesn’t feel now that she’s older. “When I was younger, there were definitely executives who were like, ‘She should lose some weight.’ When I got into my 20s, I thought, ‘Well now I’m either going to starve myself or jog,’ and neither of those things sound like fun.”
She added: “But now I feel like all of my friends are doing jobs where they’re saying they don’t want that skinny actress – they want someone who looks more like regular people.”
Anna Kendrick wants women to be known for their talent, not their looks.
“You’re constantly having to prove that you’re not just a pretty face and you have actual opinions and thoughts,” the actress told Refinery29 in an interview published on Wednesday.
Kendrick said it’s “frustrating” when women are asked about their beauty routines, but men aren’t asked about their workouts or grooming habits.
“I can talk about my experience of trying to get ready for a movie premiere and what I did to get ready and then I’m like, ‘And now let’s talk about the movie!'” she said.
The actress went on to say that women who speak out about gender inequality are often labeled as “shrill.”
“It’s just kind of frustrating that the only way that people will listen is if we’re like, ‘Hey, guys! Time out!’ And then they’ll listen,” she said.
I mean, it’s hard because if people know you don’t have any experience then they’re just excited that you showed up, and you’re a girl, and so they’re like, ‘heeeey!’ You know? It’s really easy to get that reputation of being ‘the girl who shows up.’ And that’s what I was.
I think it’s really damaging for women because there’s this pressure to be pretty all the time and there’s a little bit less pressure on men. Like, no one ever said anything about Heath Ledger not being handsome, but I think people said things about me not being pretty enough to play an ingénue or whatever.
But there are so many different types of beautiful people in the world. It would be weird to me if everybody looked the same.
For Kendrick, the problem is not just that women are underrepresented in Hollywood—it’s that the women who are there are expected to be “better” than their male counterparts. “Somehow we’re supposed to be better at everything than men,” she says. “We have to be better at everything and hot too.”
Because of this pressure to be pretty, it’s easy for female stars to start second-guessing themselves on set, Kendrick explains. It’s not a problem with the roles they’re given—she’s been lucky enough to find scripts that don’t require her to be thin or beautiful—but with the way we as a society view women in general.
“I always feel like I’m constantly apologizing for being overweight or ugly or whatever it is,” she says. “It becomes this thing where you stop worrying about your performance and start thinking about yourself.”
CuteAct is a contributor at CuteAct. We are committed to providing well-researched, accurate, and valuable content to our readers.
