Thandie Newton hasn’t been shy about speaking on the exploitation and humiliation associated with auditions in her early career. As a teenager, Newton was caught in a “casting couch” audition after already passing the first stage of casting.
The Pursuit of Happyness actress recounted the incident to CNN while advocating for the sexual violence awareness campaign One Billion Rising. "The director asked me to sit with my legs apart; the camera was right positioned where it could see up my skirt.” She described how the director instructed her to "put my leg over the arm of the chair, and before I started my dialogue, think about the character I was supposed to be having the dialogue with and how it felt to be made love to by this person."
No one can ever convince us that Lea Michele isn’t dedicated. Right before the decisive audition that placed her as the lead actress of Glee, Michele got into a major car accident near the studio where the casting call took place.
The crash might have totaled her car, but Michele participated in the audition business as usual. "I got into a massive car crash outside of the Fox lot — completely totaling my car," she confessed during a featurette on the Season 1 DVD. "When I get into the room for my audition, I literally was still pulling pieces of glass out of my hair. They're like, 'Are you okay?' I'm like, 'I'm fine!'"
Real Housewife of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna dished to Popeater regarding her own experience enduring the Hollywood “casting couch.”
“I lost a role on a BIG TV series because I wouldn’t bend over a chair in a producer's office for ‘just a quickie,’” Lisa said. “‘Just pull your panties down and bend over and the role is yours’ he said to me.”
Schitt’s Creek actress Emily Hampshire reported to Buzzfeed that she hid in her shirt in the presence of Dan Levy because she was so nervous.
Hampshire clarifies that "lifting up my top is the wrong way to put it. I know the audience for that and Dan is not interested in that. Hiding is very different from flashing."
Susan Sarandon’s acting career has stretched over multiple decades, so there’s probably plenty of bad audition stories under her belt. However, she claims that the worst casting experience happened in her very early career when she was a wanna-be star.
Sarandon didn’t disclose much about the incident other than that it was tainted by sexual assault. “It was not successful — for either of us,” Sarandon confessed to Elle in 2012. “I just went into a room, and a guy practically threw me on the desk. It was my early days in New York, and it was really disgusting. It wasn’t like I gave it a second thought, it was so badly done.”
Anna Kendrick reported to Glamour in 2015 how she sometimes has to wait for all of the male roles to be cast before she’s even considered for a part.
“There’s [a film I’m considering] now where I have to wait for all the male roles to be cast before I can even become a part of the conversation. Part of me gets that. [But] part of me is like, ‘What the f**k? You have to cast for females based on who’s cast as males?'” We’re still wrapping our head around this one.
Jennifer Lawrence’s worst audition also occurred during her early career (seeing a trend here?) when she was expected to lose 15 pounds within two weeks. She opened up about the humiliating experience at Elle Magazine’s 2017 Women in Entertainment event, stating, “I let myself be treated a certain way because I felt like I had to for my career."
"During this time, a female producer had me do a nude lineup with about five women who were much, much thinner than me,” JLaw told the crowd. “And we all stood side-by-side with only paste-ons covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating lineup, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet."
At merely 18-years old, Atomic Blonde bad-ass Charlize Theron was lured to a director’s house for a particularly odd audition. "It was a little odd that the audition was on a Saturday night, at his house in Los Angeles," she told Marie Claire in 2005. "But I didn't know anything about the business, so I thought maybe that was a normal thing."
But once she entered the house and "he was in his Hugh Hefner pajamas” offering her a drink, she soon realized what the situation actually was. “I knew how to deal with it,” Theron said, confidently recalling her denial: “‘Not going to happen. Wrong girl, buddy.'"
When asked by Elle if she’d ever had her own “casting couch” experience, Gwyneth Paltrow simply replied, “Yup,” reinforcing that such a situation was a common experience for young actresses.
"When I was just starting out, someone suggested that we finish a meeting in the bedroom. I could see how someone who didn't know better might worry, 'My career will be ruined if I don't give this guy a blowjob!'"
Kiera Knightley’s Skype audition for 2011 drama A Dangerous Method involved an unprecedented amount of on-the-spot impressions.
ScreenRant reports that the worst part of the audition required her to show off her version of “horrible sex faces” to director David Cronenberg. If that wasn’t already bad, “the screen froze in the middle of a moment where Knightley was making one of the worst type of sexual gestures.” That’s pretty much everyone’s worst nightmare.
During an audition for the James Bond film Die Another Day, Rosamund Pike awkwardly refused to strip for the casting directors.
“I remember them saying I was to drop my dress and appear in my underwear,” Pike said on an Amazon Audible session. “On that day, I don't know how I got the resolve and strength of mind, but I just thought 'actually sod that, if they're gonna see me in my underwear, they better give me the job.'” Fortunately, she landed the part alongside Pierce Brosnan as a result of her confidence!
In 2007, Helen Mirren held nothing back during an interview with Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan when she put director Michael Winner—who allegedly treated her “like a piece of meat” during an audition—on blast for his blatant sexism.
She stated that Winner made her show off her body during a 1964 casting call. "I was mortified and incredibly angry. I thought it was insulting and sexist, and I don't think any actress should be treated like that—like a piece of meat—at all.” In a terribly problematic response, Winner denied the claims and gaslit Mirren, stating that “her memory of [the audition] is a little flawed."
Emmy Rossum opened up about a weird casting request at The Hollywood Reporter's 2017 Comedy Actress Roundtable. “My agent called me and was like, ‘I'm so embarrassed to make this call, but there's a big movie and they're going to offer it to you. They really love your work on the show. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There's no audition. That's all you have to do.’”
She wasn’t thrown off by the request until she realized that there wasn’t one bikini in the movie. “He wanted to know if I was fat now. That was basically the question.”
It’s no surprise that Transformers director Michael Bay has a questionable reputation in terms of interacting with actresses. One of the skeeviest occurrences happened when casting Megan Fox, reportedly making her wash a Ferrari and filming every second.
While that request doesn’t sound too weird on the surface, it’s a mystery where that footage ended up with Fox telling reporter Jason Solomons she was “concerned” about the tape’s whereabouts. When Solomons questioned Bay about the tape, the director suspiciously replied, "Er, I don't know where it is either.”
Variety’s 2016 Cannes Film Festival panel sported Chloe Sevigny as a mouthpiece for young actresses who’ve experienced inappropriate comments or requests during auditions. She was once advised to “show your body off more. You shouldn't wait until you’re as old as this certain actress who had just been naked in a film, you should be naked on screen now."
Sevigny admitted that “If you’re young and impressionable and really want the part, it might be a tempting avenue, but I hope not.”
A 2017 interview with The Guardian helped Zoe Kazan speak out regarding systematic sexism on film sets, in audition rooms, and practically ingrained in every part of the Hollywood scene. “I have a lot of girlfriends… and many times we’ve talked about having to go into a room and give ‘blowjob eyes.' You know, be flirty with a director or a producer. It’s the sense that your sexuality is somehow baked into this situation.”
On top of that horrific standard, Kazan gave a personal anecdote: "There’ll be auditions where they’ll say, ‘Wear something body-conscious’ and then you’re aware that they’re checking out your body. You leave the situation feeling not good about what just happened, but you don’t really have the language for why. You feel like, if you said something, it would reflect badly on you."
Jane the Virgin feature actress Gina Rodriguez discussed a sexist Hollywood experience among female colleagues during a Hollywood Reporter roundtable in 2015.
Rodriguez said, “I was up for a role and auditioned in character. They're like: ‘We love her. But can she come back in with a tight black dress?’ I said, ‘That doesn't make any sense for the character.’ They were like, ‘We need to know if you're pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine.’"
Lena Heady, Game of Thrones icon and five-time Emmy nominated actress, told co-star Maisie Williams onThe Edit about the sexism littered throughout her early acting career, claiming she lost roles because she never “played the game of going [to auditions] and flirting.”
Even more horrifically, Heady recalled an audition in her early twenties: “When I was doing a lot of audition tapes in the States, a casting director told me: 'The men take these tapes home and watch them and say, 'Who would you f**k?'” Let’s just say that Heady wasn’t impressed by the news.
Alison Brie experienced the worst of Hollywood sexism during an audition for the male-oriented show Entourage.
She discussed Hollywood’s evergreen sexism at the ATX Television Festival in 2017, stating, “The audition process has not changed that much… 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 [the producers] were like, ‘Okay, can you take your top off now?’"
Alongside male co-star Nicolas Holt, Emma Stone’s The Favourite audition required humming, heavy panting, and sculpting imaginary force fields into different shapes.
“I auditioned for Yorgos [Lanthimos], he had me pant like I was giving birth throughout the lines,” Emma Stone said ahead of the film’s screening in New York. “I think he just does this to everyone.”
Anyone auditioning for the movie-musical Coyote Ugly probably expected to dance during their audition. Unfortunately for January Jones, the producer asked her to dance for him “on top of the table,” leading to what Jones describes to The Hollywood Reporter as “one of the worst moments of my entire life.”
“They said, ‘You’re going to dance to Prince’s ‘Kiss.’ You’re going to pole dance, but there is no pole.’ And I just turned beet red. It was awful, and he said something like, ‘Honey, you did a great reading, but you’ve got no rhythm.’ I called my agent and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’”
Surprisingly enough, Emilia Clarke had to fight for her role as the Mother of Dragons… or, rather, dance for it. Her audition, which was short notice and crunched for time before production went underway, was quite high pressure.
At the end of the audition, Clarke asked the producers if she could do anything else for the many HBO employees sitting in on her audition. One of the writers suggested she “do a dance,” Clarke told Jimmy Fallon The Tonight Show. “I don’t know how to do it but I did the funky chicken and I morphed into the robot.” Looks like the freestyling worked in her favor!
Jimmy Kimmel discussed Brie Larson’s mystery audition for Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck in 2015, pointing out that she was unaware that she was auditioning for a major role. Or auditioning at all, in fact.
Larson discussed how Bill Hader and Schumer invited her to lunch, asking her for “stories about her life” and meeting up to hang for days at a time. “I have a long history of being cast in movies that I think are dramas that I later find out, when the movie comes out, are comedies… This is another case where that happened.”
Vogue reported in 2019 that Canadian actress Sandra Oh walked away from her Grey’s Anatomy audition. We don’t want to think about if a different actress played Cristina Yang… Good thing she nailed the audition anyway!
She bailed early for “a combination of reasons,” including leaving her phone at home, forgetting her wallet, and a “last-second call” from her agent. “I came in early, warmed up and then waited to test with everyone else. Then it’s like, ‘Sorry, I have to leave.’”
Speaking of Sandra Oh, she completely threw Killing Eve co-star for a loop at their chemistry read audition. In an interview with BUILD, Comer described how actors typically have to imagine any props that a scene calls for.
However, Oh had been unusually prepared with an entire pie. “I had to eat in the scene, so I had this blueberry pie. By the time I left the audition I was halfway through it… Yeah, I felt a little bit sick when I left.”
In a 2019 interview with Backstage, Jamie Lee Curtis was specifically asked about audition horror stories.
“I auditioned very poorly for Field of Dreams,” she confessed. “For some reason, and I don’t remember why, I just wasn’t prepared for it… but I do remember auditioning for it, and feeling like I just blew up. I think I just stopped in the middle of it and said, ‘Look guys, I’m really sorry, I’m out.’ I just—excuse my French—f***ed it up.”
The casting call for The Good Place was especially weird for every actor involved aside from Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. Rolling Stone reports that those auditioning for the other four regular roles were “kept in the dark until after they were hired. They were given fake script pages.”
Jamil spoke on her own experience with the fake-out scripts. “[Producer Mike Shur] wanted me to do a fake interview to the camera as if I was the character, but I didn’t know anything about this character... I didn’t know anything about the storyline or anything.” She continued, “So I did something about Lady Diana and did an improv for 10 minutes. I blacked out through the whole thing and somehow got a call a week later saying I had the job.”
Jamil’s co-star D’Arcy Carden confessed in the Rolling Stone piece that she was similarly confused at her audition. “There was no indication that [my character] was AI or robotic or anything at all.
“The person who auditioned before me was like a 15-year-old boy, and the woman who auditioned after me was like in her sixties. So walking into that audition, I was like, ‘Oh, boy, I don’t know what this is.’”
Once a normal Hawaiian teenager, Auli’i Cravalho was recruited by Disney to become Princess Moana without ever seeking out an audition.
The breakout actress told ScreenRant, “I certainly had a learning curve with [voice acting]. I had never done anything like this before. I mean, I was the director and producer of my backyard plays, but besides that there was nothing that I had done that was similar to this… it’s so important that this film is inspired by my culture.”
Jada Pinkett Smith took her audition for sleazy Gotham villain Fish Mooney into her own hands, preparing a fully-costumed act that, as RadioTimes states, “show[ed] just how depraved her character could be.”
“I came in with a gown and a short black wig, with a young man on a leash, who had no shirt on and ‘liar’ written across his forehead in lipstick,” Smith said. “ I thought, ‘Forget it, instead of talking about who Fish Mooney is, let me just show him.’ I went method on it.”
