When young girls seem to be extensively jaded by their existence before they’ve even reached their teenage years, a common refrain is deployed: they’re nine going on 30, or 11 going on 50, and generally too young to be feeling so old. Greta Gerwig‘s summer blockbuster Barbie made room for all of these different phases of girlhood and womanhood. It struck a particularly sensitive chord among women with an emotional monologue delivered by America Ferrera, but much younger girls saw themselves in her speech, too.
In a recent interview with People, Ferrera detailed an encounter she had with a “young girl” who auditioned for a theater program using the monologue. She found it “hilarious” but also found it “super sad that 11-year-old girls resonate with that monologue and already feel like they know what it’s saying.”
In two-and-a-half minutes speech, her character Gloria tells Barbie all about the impossible task of meeting all of the contradicting expectations that women face: “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.”
The list of impossible rights and wrongs goes on and on. Answer for men’s bad behavior, but don’t complain. Stay pretty for those same men, but don’t tempt them. Don’t get old. Don’t fail. Don’t show fear. Don’t step out of line. “I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us,” Gloria tells Barbie. “And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”
Ferrera added that she’s also encountered mothers who have told her that their children watched Barbie with them and afterward asked: “Why were you crying?” But it seems to be an inevitable emotional reaction — Ferrera and Gerwig cried while crafting it, and so did the crew on set while she recited it. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Ferrera shared that she spent two days reciting the monologue on set, going through about 30 to 50 takes.
“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, I don’t know, I guess easier for people to hear or to swallow,” she explained. “Greta really didn’t want that. She wanted it to just sound like the truth.”
Speaking to the New York Times, Ferrera added: “Greta asked me, ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you would say? Write it in your own words. What would you add?’ Not every director starts out by inviting actors to rewrite their work. Some of what we talked about made it into the script. The line, “Always be grateful,” came out of that conversation with Greta … We ended in tears. It ended in laughter, it got big, it got small, and I was able to do that because I really trusted Greta to know what would be right for the film.”
