A new interview with Christina Hendricks in The Guardian is making the rounds because of the (schadenfreude-tastic) revelation that the actress was dropped by her agency when she signed up to play Joan Holloway on Mad Men.
Hendricks recalls, “They said, ‘It’s a period piece, it’s never going to go anywhere. We need you to make money, and this isn’t going to make money.’ They ended up dropping me.”
But the even more attention-grabbing comment, at least to us, occurs elsewhere in the piece, when the actress opens up about what working as a woman in Hollywood is really like: “You know, it’s difficult in the arts to pinpoint it, but there’s sexual harassment at work every single day, all day long. Certainly in the respect and position [of women], you feel like, ‘Am I allowed to ask these questions or contribute in this way?’”
She apparently sees the industry’s endemic sexism as a symptom of society’s larger inequalities: “Society has conditioned you that way. As women, we feel we can’t ask for things. There’s been a lot of research done recently and, more often than not, if a woman goes in to ask for a raise, she’ll get it. But she’s thinking, ‘Do I deserve it? I’ve got to give a list of why I deserve it.’ Whereas a man will just go in and ask for a raise. It’s so scary.”
[via The Guardian]
