SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains details from the plot of Barbie.
Barbie‘s America Ferrera has offered new insights into her experience preparing to deliver a showstopping monologue from the Warner Bros film’s third act.
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In the film starring Margot Robbie as the iconic Mattel doll, Ferrera plays Gloria, a Mattel employee from the real world who, with daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), encounters Barbie, making it clear to this doll come to life that she’s great just as she is, even if society tends to place much pressure and many contradictory demands upon women. The idea expressed, Ferrera explained in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, is about “the impossible assignment of being all things to all people.”
Ferrera shared that when filmmaker Greta Gerwig first approached her about the role of Gloria and this specific monologue, it was “flattering” but at the same time “felt like pressure in the nicest way.” When the actress read the speech, she explained, “it hit me as powerful and meaningful. It also felt like, wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful. But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn’t want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it.”
In terms of preparing to deliver the monologue, Ferrera thought first and foremost about the tone with which she was approaching it. “My big question was, “okay, so how are we playing this? Am I playing this slightly humorously? Am I trying to deliver it in a tone that still fits into the tone of Barbie Land?” said the actress. “It was interesting that I initially felt that we wouldn’t just go as straightforward and real with it as we did, that I assumed that there might be a tone that maybe made it…easier for people to hear or to swallow. Greta really didn’t want that. She wanted it to just sound like the truth.”
Ferrera would shoot the monologue scene over the course of two days, and while she felt like she did it “like 500” times, she thinks the real number is “probably” somewhere between 30 and 50. “By the end,” she said, her co-star Greenblatt could recite the monologue to her from memory “because that’s how many times I had said it.”
Reflecting on the cheers her monologue prompted at the Los Angeles premiere of Barbie, ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Ferrera said that “to be able to hear audiences connecting to it in that way with a response like that is amazing. [The monologue] worked on the page, and so I definitely wanted to give that feeling to the audience as the person performing it—to make it resonate the way that it did with me when I read the words on the page.”
Barbie made history this weekend by notching the biggest-ever opening for a film by a female director at a total of around $344M. Others joining Ferrera in the film include Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, Issa Rae and Will Ferrell, to name just a few. Among other upcoming projects for the actress are Craig Gillespie’s starry film Dumb Money on the GameStop short squeeze, which is set to premiere at TIFF ahead of a September 22nd bow in theaters, and Pixar’s Elio.
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