Women in Hollywood – like Carey Mulligan, Rose Byrne, and Geena Davis – are pretty done with its sexist garbage, and they’re all speaking out about it this week.
Talking with Time Out London about her role in the upcoming film Suffragette (trailer here!), Mulligan said that “[t]he mere fact that it’s taken 100 years for this story to be told is hugely revealing. This is the story of equal rights in Britain and it took years of struggle and women being tortured, abused and persecuted, and it’s never been put on screen.”
“It’s such a reflection of our film industry that that story hasn’t been told yet,” continued Mulligan. “In terms of the amount of interesting roles there are for women, it’s obviously massively sexist. There’s a lack of material for women. A lack of great stories for women.”
Byrne also called out Hollywood’s sexist double-standards when she was asked in an interview if she thinks it’s harder for women to be funny.
“It’ll be exciting when people are not asking why women are funny,” she said. “It’s somehow still a subject of conversation, which I find baffling. I mean, they certainly didn’t ask the guys from The Hangover, ‘Wow, this is amazing, five guys can be funny!’ It’s such a double standard.”
Our beloved Rebecca Pahle over at Film Journal International had the chance to speak with Geena Davis, whose own Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has been hugely influential on bringing to light the disparities in Hollywood – like the fact that only 30% of speaking roles on film go to women. “We don’t want to just say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if more films had women directors and had better diversity?,'” said Davis of the Institute. “We want to actually impact [diversity] rather than merely point it out or celebrate when someone gets it right. We want to try and make it happen much more often.”
To remedy this, Davis and the Institute are starting the Bentonville Film Festival, to which you can apply if your film has a female or minority lead, director, writer, or production company. “We’ve had so many movies starring women, directed by women, about women that have been huge successes, and yet we haven’t seemed to get any momentum going,” continued Davis. “But we’re hoping this initiative is going to get it going.”
Keep fighting the good fight, ladies. You rock.
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