This anonymous actress is tweeting every sexist casting call she sees
For the past few years, an anonymous actress calling herself Miss L has been tweeting every sexist comment she encounters during casting calls.
It’s quite a collection. It’s not clear when they are all from, but it doesn’t really matter; the timeline reads like an unending stream of misogyny and terrible production ideas.
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She’s also begun a Tumblr, Casting Call Woe, compiling some of the “greatest” hits.
In an email, “L,” identified by The Independent as “London-based,” says she’s been tweeting terrible casting calls for about four years now, and that the Tumblr has been running for just more than three years. She’s been acting for a decade.
“It all started out of frustration at seeing such ridiculous things and really just wanting other people to see what actors were dealing with on a daily basis,” she said. Traffic has increased with media attention to the sit and with Hollywood names speaking out about inequality and sexism within the industry, she said.
There are too many terrible casting calls to pick an all-time winner, she said, but one (embedded above) just looking for a woman to play a pair of floating boobs for a music video “is probably one of the most ridiculous I’ve seen.”
As for her anonymity?
“Being an actor is tough enough without being known as the one who shouts about all the terrible castings!” she said. “It gives me a bit of protection as an actress and means I can tweet about these things without damaging my career too much.”
Maureen Dowd recently wrote about the pervasive, storied sexism in Hollywood for The New York Times Magazine. According to a study commissioned by actress Geena Davis, from 2007 through 2014, women made up only 30.2% of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films, and that in both 2013 and 2014, women represented only 1.9% of the directors for the 100 top-grossing films.
‘‘It’s kind of like the church,’’ actress Anjelica Huston, whose father, John Huston, “helped set the template for macho directors,” told Dowd. ‘‘They don’t want us to be priests. They want us to be obedient nuns.’
Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.