Today's reminder about the inequalities faced by women in the entertainment industry comes courtesy of Alison Brie. The actress, who stars in the upcoming female-centric Netflix series GLOW, recently opened up about an audition from her past that was wildly inappropriate, to say the least.
Following a screening of her new series, in which Brie plays a struggling actress who, tired of the one-dimensional roles she's usually asked to read for, is ultimately cast in a league of female wrestlers, she got real about how different working on the show was from the industry sexism characteristic of the 1980s setting it depicts—and how much of Hollywood is still pretty sexist. "It has not changed that much," Brie told Entertainment Weekly. "The audition process has not changed that much."
Brie revealed that years ago, in an audition for the HBO series Entourage, the casting panel asked her to take her top off. She said, "Early in my career, I auditioned for three lines on an episode of Entourage that I had to go on in a bikini! Or like shorts and the tiniest shorts. And they were like, 'OK, can you take your top off now?'"
Jennifer Euston, the casting director for GLOW, later took to Twitter to share her disdain for the experience Brie had. She tweeted, "...makes me sick there are producers who abuse their power & if there was a Casting Director present, they did nothing? Inexcusable."
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HBO hasn't yet commented on Brie's claims, though her story isn't hard to believe, considering the hordes of naked women who appeared on the show over the years in roles that were hardly complex or, frankly, realistic.
Betty Gilpin, Brie's GLOW costar, also recounted an audition before a room full of men in which she was asked to take down her hair. "That’s gross," Euston commented in response, according to EW.
Brie also pointed out that not only do actresses regularly face sexism on the job, but they are often left to compete with one another for reductive, uninteresting roles. "I've gone through auditions for Marvel movies and auditioned a million times for roles with three lines and you are begging for them," she said. "And I’d be glad to get them! It’s brutal, it just is."
Girl power prevails, though; GLOW hits Netflix on June 23.
Update: Amid the outrage over her comments about her audition for Entourage, Brie herself chimed in on Twitter to clarify that she wasn't asked to appear completely topless—instead, she was asked to remove her shirt, under which she was wearing a bikini top. She tweeted, "Re:Entourage - CLARIFICATION - I had a bikini top on UNDER my top. They didn't ask me to get totally topless. Sorry to disappoint you! 😎"
It's an improvement, but not by much, if you ask us.
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