1.
Kathy Bates has spoken multiple times about struggling to be cast due to her appearance. “I’m not a stunning woman. I never was an ingenue; I’ve always just been a character actor,” she told the New York Times in 1991. “When I was younger it was a real problem, because I was never pretty enough for the roles that other young women were being cast in. The roles I was lucky enough to get were real stretches for me: usually a character who was older, or a little weird, or whatever.”
Specifically, she was passed over for the role of Frankie in the 1991 film Frankie and Johnny. Bates had actually played the role on Broadway in the play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair De Lune, which Frankie and Johnny was adapted from — so she seemed like the obvious choice for the role. However, director Garry Marshall doubted that people would see her as a romantic lead. “He couldn’t make the leap that people would see me onscreen kissing someone. Me actually kissing a man onscreen — that would not be romantic,” Bates said. Michelle Pfeiffer was cast instead.
2.
Kat Dennings was told she was not “pretty enough” when she was literally 12 years old. Speaking about the “cruel” comments she received as a child actor, she recalled, “I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.'” Luckily, Dennings ignored them, and she says Hollywood is “much softer, kinder” today.
3.
Gillian Anderson is best known for her iconic role as Scully in The X-Files. However, she almost wasn’t cast in the role. Executives at Fox thought Anderson didn’t have enough sex appeal. Series creator Chris Carter said, “Even though Gillian’s beautiful, she wasn’t their idea of sexy. First, because they didn’t understand what I was trying to do with the show. And she was an unknown, so that never helps.” The network wanted to cast a “bombshell type, ideally someone like Pamela Anderson,” according to Carter. Luckily, they went with Anderson instead, and she helped make the show hugely successful.
4.
Benedict Cumberbatch also almost lost out on one of his most famous roles: Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series Sherlock. Series co-creator Mark Gatiss revealed that higher-ups believed Cumberbatch lacked sex appeal and that his nose was “entirely wrong.” They were also concerned that Cumberbatch was an unknown. However, he embodied the role so well that he was cast and proved everyone wrong. “As he walked through into 221B Baker Street it all changed. He was a weird man a few minutes ago, a sort of ginger weird person. But that disappeared,” Gatiss said.
5.
Today, Lea Michele is a successful Broadway and TV actor, best known for her breakout role as Rachel Berry on Glee. However, there was a time when producers did not think she would make it in Hollywood. “I was always told I was too Jewish-looking for television [and that] I wasn’t pretty enough, all of that,” she told Jake Shane on his podcast.
She was actually pressured to get a nose job as a teenager. “From a very young age, I must’ve been maybe only 13 years old, I started being told by managers and agents that in order to make it on television or be on covers of magazines that I was going to have to get a nose job,” she recalled. However, she ignored the feedback and was able to make it in Hollywood anyway.
6.
Bella Ramsey was not told explicitly that they were not pretty enough for a role, but they were once told they lost a role because they “didn’t have the ‘Hollywood look.'” This was in one of their first auditions; luckily, they didn’t lose hope, and, of course, went on to be cast in a breakout role in Game of Thrones and later in the massively successful The Last of Us.
7.
Judi Dench was once told she would not find success in Hollywood due to her having “every single thing wrong with her face.” She recalled, “I didn’t become a film star in the ’60s and that’s because I once went for a film — which I have always kept a secret, and the director a secret too — he said at the end of the interview, ‘Jolly nice meeting you but I’m sorry, you won’t ever make a film because your face is wrongly arranged.'” The director was wrong; Dench is an Oscar-winning actor with a long, storied career.
8.
Chris Pine lost the role of Ryan in The O.C. due to bad acne. “He was really, really, really good,” the show’s casting director, Patrick Rush, revealed. “But, this is painful; at the time, Chris Pine’s skin was really, really bad. And that broke my heart, because I was a kid with acne.” When asked about the comment, Pine said he had “a little PTSD” from his time having “bad skin,” calling it “one of the most traumatic points of my life” and expressing how difficult it was to audition while dealing with acne.
“Look, I was going for The O.C., like, a teenage melodrama. I can understand that they wanted to have pretty people doing pretty things, and you know, bad acne is not key to…” Pine said, trailing off. The role of Ryan went to Benjamin McKenzie, but things worked out just fine for Pine, who became a major movie star.
9.
Welsh actor Joanna Page was cast despite initially being told she was not pretty enough for a role. “I had an audition and I’d been back about nine times and it was going really good,” she said. “And then they said to my agent, ‘Could you please tell her that we just don’t think she’s pretty enough before the next callback? And to go to the department store and get them to do her makeup and everything and then come to the audition.'” Page ultimately got the part after addressing feedback, including getting accent coaching.
10.
Andrew Garfield lost out on the role of Prince Caspian in the Chronicles of Narnia series because he wasn’t “handsome enough.” He had made it down to the final two, but they went with Ben Barnes instead. “Ben Barnes is a very handsome, talented man,” Garfield said. “So in retrospect, I’m not unhappy with the decision and I think he did a beautiful job.” Of course, Garfield would go on to become a heartthrob and find major success in Hollywood.
11.
After being recast following the pilot for Stumptown, actor Mark Webber went on a social media rant about how he was allegedly fired for not being attractive enough. Webber wrote, “Look, I’m a straight white male so I know my journey has been way less painful in this warped industry, but I’m being recast in a network television show because I’m not handsome enough for the executives,” calling his treatment “degrading.” The role went to Jake Johnson.
12.
According to composer Anne Dudley, Poldark executive producer Damien Timmer was worried women wouldn’t find star Aidan Turner attractive. Dudley reassured Timmer that they would — and she was right. Turner quickly became a major heartthrob.
13.
Just six weeks before Sharon Stone was cast in Basic Instinct — which would make her a sex symbol and household name — her manager told her she wasn’t getting roles because nobody thought she was sexy. “I wasn’t, as they liked to say in Hollywood at the time, ‘fuckable,'” Stone wrote in her autobiography. However, that all changed when she was cast in her breakout role in the film.
14.
Samantha Morton also claimed she lost out on a role in The Brothers Grimm because producers thought she was “unfuckable” — and that Harvey Weinstein had apparently specifically said, ‘Who’d fuck that?” There were also claims that he said her upper arms were “too fat” (which he denied).
15.
Amy Adams claimed that she was fired from Dr. Vegas for “not being sexy enough” to play Rob Lowe’s love interest, a claim Lowe echoed in his book Love Life, adding that Adams wasn’t pretty “in a TV way.” Adams did clarify she wasn’t technically fired, but they “brought in a really tall blonde, and I knew.”
16.
Fellow redheaded beauty Jessica Chastain was also told she wasn’t pretty enough to get roles in Hollywood. “Only in the past five years have people been telling me I’m attractive. Before then, I wasn’t getting parts because people kept telling me I wasn’t pretty enough,” she revealed. “People would tell me to dye my hair blonde when I first started auditioning. Funny how defined we are by how we present ourselves.”
17.
Burt Reynolds claimed he had to fight for Sally Field to be cast alongside him in Smokey and the Bandit because of her looks. “I wanted her really bad, but the filmmakers said, ‘Well, she’s not sexy,'” he told the Today show. “And I said, ‘You don’t get it, talent is sexy.’ And she’s got that.” Field actually took the role because of critics calling her “ugly” after seeing her in Sybil. “If I play this character that Burt is supposed to think is attractive, maybe the world will think I’m attractive, and somebody else will hire me,” she said.
This wasn’t the first time Field heard she was too “ugly.” Early in her career, she told her agent she wanted to move from TV into movies. Her agent told her, ‘Well that’s ridiculous. You can’t do that, you can’t get into film. You’re not pretty enough. You’re not good enough.'” Field fired her agent soon after, and of course, went on to become a major film star.
18.
Similarly, Nia Vardalos’s first agent told her she was “wasn’t pretty enough to be a leading lady and not fat enough to be a character actor.” It was negative experiences like these that pushed her to write the megahit My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “It hurt to be told that my ethnicity and my looks were the problem,” Vardalos said. “I never had my looks categorized as being detrimental to my career. So, anyway, f— her, because look how it turned out.”
19.
Kristen Bell was similarly told after auditions, “Well, you’re not pretty enough to play the pretty girl, but you’re not quirky enough or weird enough to play the weird girl.” She found the feedback disheartening, saying it made her wonder if she could be an actor. Luckily, she feels that as she’s gotten older, “those boxes have changed and they’ve almost gone away.”
20.
Elle Fanning was once told she didn’t get a role because she was “unfuckable.” Fanning was 16, and the role was for the daughter in a father-daughter road trip comedy. “It’s so disgusting,” Fanning said of the experience. “There are so many stories like this that I’ve heard and talked to people about. I laugh at it now; I’m like, ‘What a disgusting pig!'” Though Fanning does acknowledge that at the time, “I don’t feel like it damaged me, but it definitely made me very aware of myself.”
21.
Gwyneth Paltrow was told by the studio that she wasn’t attractive enough to star in Golden Gate at age 20, despite the fact that director John Madden was interested in her for the role. “The guy at Fox who made the decisions said I wasn’t pretty enough,” she remembered. “I find it best to be in total denial over remarks like that. I refuse to hear or see. Otherwise, it would drive you nuts.” The role went to Teri Polo instead.
22.
Earlier in her career, Reese Witherspoon consistently received feedback relating to her sex appeal. She was once told she was “too smart” to play the role of a young woman, and later struggled to find roles after becoming pigeonholed for her straight-laced role in Election. It got to the point where her rep told her to “wear a sexy outfit” and “pretend not to be smart” next time she met with a studio head.
In fact, Witherspoon almost lost out on the role of Elle in Legally Blonde because “they thought [she] was a shrew” and “repellent.” She was again told to “dress sexy” for the studio head.*
23.
Mindy Kaling was told that not only was she not attractive enough to play herself in a sketch show, but she also wasn’t funny enough. After offering her the show, the network made her audition, then declined to cast her, in a move that Kaling called “humiliating.” However, it worked out for Kaling: “That network is no longer on the air, and The Office went on to be one of NBC’s most hit shows in years. I feel like karmically, I was vindicated, but at the time it felt terrible,” she recalled.
24.
Winona Ryder was told in the ’80s that she wasn’t attractive enough to be a star. In particular, at a specific audition, a casting director stopped her mid-sentence and told her, “You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don’t have it.” Ryder called her “very blunt,” adding, “I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor.” She hasn’t named the role or the casting director, who was clearly wrong — Ryder went on to find massive success while she was still a teenager.
25.
Emma Thompson says she was deemed “not pretty enough” by male executives to do nude scenes, which lost her roles. “I have also never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked.” She continued, “I’m too mouthy, not pretty enough, not the right kind of body. And, crikey, you are constantly told what kind of body you have. In one interview I did, the male journalist wrote that I’d put on a lot of weight since I appeared in Fortunes of War, and that my legs were ‘now like tree trunks,’ and that I’d ‘let myself down.’ I was 31 and, quite frankly, no longer starving myself. I don’t think anyone realises quite how thin most actresses are in real life. They look quite… unreal.”
26.
According to Kate Beckinsale, director Michael Bay didn’t think she was attractive enough for her role in Pearl Harbor because she “wasn’t blonde and [her] boobs weren’t bigger than [her] head.” “I didn’t make sense to him as an attractive woman,” Beckinsale told Yahoo Entertainment. “So there was a lot of panic and concern over, ‘How on earth are we gonna make her attractive?'” Beckinsale was put on an intense workout regimen and diet before filming for the mvoie.
27.
Minnie Driver almost didn’t star in Good Will Hunting because the producer didn’t think she was “hot enough.” Driver called it the rudest thing anyone had said to her in Hollywood — she later revealed that it was Harvey Weinstein who said it. Luckily, writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as director Gus Van Sant, fought for her to get the role, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
28.
Viola Davis was told she wasn’t pretty or light-skinned enough numerous times throughout her career. She didn’t mention specific roles, but she did say the feedback was often in relation to romantic comedies. “A lot of it is based in race. It really is,” she said. “Let’s be honest: If I had my same features and I were five shades lighter, it would just be a little bit different. And if I had blonde hair, blue eyes, and even a wide nose, it would be even a little bit different than what it is now.”
Davis continued, “We could talk about colorism, we could talk about race. It pisses me off, and it has broken my heart — on a number of projects, which I won’t name.” She has, however, spoken about feedback from other actors that she “wasn’t pretty enough” to star in How to Get Away With Murder.
29.
And finally, Meryl Streep was considered “too ugly” to star in King Kong. Producer Dino De Laurentiis actually said, “Che brutta” (“How ugly”) in front of Streep when she came to audition — she understood Italian and fired back in the same language. The part went to Jessica Lange instead. Of course, Streep is now perhaps the most celebrated actor of our generation.