America Ferrera has revealed her “guilty pleasure,” while also noting that she would “regret” the admission.
During an interview with Vanity Fair on 19 July, Ferrera, 39, alongside Barbie costars Margot Robbie, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, and director Greta Gerwig, sat down to test how well they know each other with a question-and-answer game. Each star posed an intimate inquiry, and their colleagues were meant to respond with what they believed that person’s answer would be.
“What is my guilty pleasure?” The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actress asked. While Robbie, 33, thought it might be doing some self-care, and Gerwig, 39, guessed “massages,” McKinnon, 39, thought it was “looking on Redfin and fantasising about other lives.” Ferrera laughed and admitted: “No, I don’t feel guilty about any of those things.” Rae, 38, offered the answer of “spending time away from her kids,” but she was also incorrect.
“My guilty pleasure would really be like... ah, I’m going to regret saying this,” Ferrera remarked. “It’s not showering for a few days.” Immediately, Robbie screamed: “What?” The Australian movie star couldn’t believe Ferrera’s response. “I would’ve never expected that,” Robbie said.
The mother of two assumed the role of Gloria, a real-world Mattel worker, in Gerwig’s highly acclaimed film in theatres now. In a discussion with Digital Spy on 18 July, Ferrera talked about how she was happy to be cast as a character that wasn’t a Barbie doll. Though her role is meant to be an individual who is obsessed with toy dolls, she never wanted to be one.
“I didn’t want to be one of the Barbies, that wouldn’t have been as compelling to me,” she said. “To me, the message of this movie is that there is no one standard of beauty, there’s no right way to be beautiful, one right way to smart, one right way to be even Barbie. We can embrace ourselves uniquely and celebrate that.”
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the Ugly Betty star confessed she was offered her part in the movie without having auditioned for it. “It was kind of a miracle. Things like this have rarely, if ever, happened in my career, where you just get a phone call from some fabulous director who says: ‘I have a part and I want you to play it,’” she noted.
Ferrera does not have much interest in accepting jobs that don’t have a larger message which aligns with her passions, but Gerwig’s intentions with Barbie were compelling. “To get the script was just unexpected. Really, my first thought was: ‘They’re never gonna let [Gerwig] make this,’” the Hollywood icon said. Her favourite part was being able to explore the meaning “through Gloria’s eyes” because it was a perspective she thought “we never get in our culture.” Her costar Robbie admitted she was just as passionate about Gerwig’s vision for the movie in a recent interview, but she had one non-negotiable condition before she accepted her lead role.
“If [Mattel] hadn’t made that change to have a multiplicity of Barbies, I don’t think I would have wanted to attempt to make a Barbie film,” Robbie old Time magazine for their Barbie cover story. “I don’t think you should say: ‘This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like.’”
