Hayley Atwell Shares the Moment She Realized She Couldn’t Let Sexist Directors Control Her Acting
An icon, a legend, I love her immensely.
Hayley Atwell, Golden Globe and Olivier Award nominee, beloved face of period dramas everywhere, is back on our cinema screens with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One—where she takes on the role of a burglar who strikes an alliance with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on his new mission.
One of Atwell’s many press engagements for the movie was sitting down for an episode of Josh Horowitz’s podcast Happy Sad Confused, where the two chatted about her Mission Impossible character and what the set experience was like for a project like this, reminisced about her time in the MCU—where she took on the role of Agent Margaret ‘Peggy’ Carter in a number of installments from Captain America: The First Avenger to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness while also heading her own series, Agent Carter—and also exchanged some questions and answers about her decades-long career in both theater and cinema.
During this part of the interview, Horowitz presented a probing question, asking Atwell what the nastiest thing is that was ever said to her by a director. And of course, we all know that Hollywood and the world of entertainment in general can be pretty brutal places—we are getting a crystal clear reminder right about now—especially if you’re any kind of minority, but hearing new examples of it just never loses its punch.
After thinking about it for a while, Atwell landed on a director—that she decided not to name—with whom she was working for a theatre play. While the director and cast were working out how to stage a particular scene, Atwell made a suggestion that was promptly ignored. But when an older actor made that very same suggestion, the director immediately accepted it and praised it.
The kicker, though, is that when Atwell brought this double standard to the director’s attention he replied by telling her that she was “an actress under the age of thirty, why would I listen to anything you have to say?”
That’s definitely something that fits right into the “nasty comment” category, and that also sadly perfectly encapsulates how women and femme-presenting people are often seen in the entertainment business—you’re under thirty and you’re not worth listening to, but the second you turn thirty you suddenly become too old for pretty much anything.
Still, Atwell described this moment as a loud and clear wake-up call. “It was really a turning point in my career,” she told Horowitz. “I thought if I give a director too much authority over my performance and if that director is not empowering me or encouraging me or using positive, active notes, then it [is] my responsibility to self-direct. […] That made me go ‘Okay, I’m gonna have to make myself more visible then.'”
Truly words to live by, even though of course the real solution shouldn’t be learning how to navigate a system that is rigged against you but tearing down the system altogether to build a fairer one.
(featured image: Paramount)
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