A few weeks ago, 37-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal dropped the infuriating news that Hollywood considered her “too old” to bang a 55-year-old actor onscreen. Her tale was sobering but (sadly) fit the show business standard of letting leading men age while their love interests don’t.
Now Maggie’s lifting an even more depressing lid of news. She’s featured on the new cover of the Hollywood Reporter with several other acclaimed actresses, including Jessica Lange, Lizzie Caplan, and Viola Davis. Maggie says she’s been criticized from the very beginning of her career. Her manager and casting agents told her she’s never been sexy enough, not even for bad, straight-to-dvd horror movies:
“When I was starting out, I used to hear ‘no’ a lot and still do. And, ‘You’re not sexy enough. You’re not pretty enough.’ When I was really young, I auditioned for this really bad movie with vampires. I wore a dress to the audition that I thought was really hot. Then I was told I wasn’t hot enough. My manager at the time said, “Would you go back and sex it up a little bit?” So I put on leather pants, a pink leopard skinny camisole and did the audition again and still didn’t get the part. (Laughter.) After that, I was like, ‘OK, f*ck this!'”
Maggie’s seen it all. She has no more f*cks to give, and she’s spilling all sorts of tea on the inner workings of showbiz. When she was younger, she didn’t even qualify to be rejected with the “advanced” age excuse. Yet she was still waved away for not being appealing enough to male audiences. Maggie’s an Oscar-nominated actress and has taken home countless indie awards. She even got her kit off for some of these movies. Not sexy? Please.
In what world was young Maggie Gyllenhaal not hot enough to act in a terrible vampire movie? E. Edward Grey would certainly argue otherwise.
(via Hollywood Reporter)
