8 Times Directors Have Said Terrible Things to Actresses

Lena Dunham's producing partner Jenni Konner wrote for Lenny Letter about an outrageous experience the Girls creator and star had with the director of another TV show: "The director asked Lena to have dinner alone the following night with an actress on the show he works on. Not because he thought they should meet, but because he wanted Lena to persuade the actress to 'show her tits, or at least some vag' on TV. Surely Lena could make a compelling argument. After all, he continued, 'You would show anything. Even your asshole.'"

When the English actress worked on 2001 film Pearl Harbor, director Michael Bay had a curious reason for casting her: "When we were promoting the film," Beckinsale said on The Graham Norton Show, "Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben [Affleck] and Josh [Hartnett], and he said, 'I have worked with Ben before and I love him, and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor'. Then when he was asked about me, he'd say, 'Kate wasn't so attractive that she would alienate the female audience'." Bay has since defended his comments, saying that he and Beckinsale are friendly and that she'd meant it as a "funny story." But it's hard to take that seriously when he also said something similar about her to Movieline in 2001: "I didn't want someone who was too beautiful."

"I remember a director telling my agent that it would be great if I could lose 10 pounds as long as my boobs didn't get smaller," the Boyhood actress told Fortune. But she wasn't having it: "I didn't want to lose 10 pounds and I didn't." That's not the only time Arquette heard about her weight from TV executives, though; when she was starring on Medium, as psychic sleuth Allison DuBois, a producer said, "Honey, you gotta lose some weight!" Luckily, the showrunner didn't agree.

Ryder had her looks critiqued early on in her career, she told Interview: "I remember one time in particular. I was in the middle of auditioning, and I was mid-sentence when the casting director said, 'Listen, kid. You should not be an actress. You are not pretty enough. You should go back to wherever you came from and you should go to school. You don't have it.' She was very blunt—I honestly think that she thought she was doing me a favor." We're glad the Stranger Things star didn't listen.

This ugly comment from a director at least gets points for creativity—though we can't condone anything else about it. For The Wrap, Fargo's Mary Elizabeth Winstead recalled an occasion when a director remarked on her weight in a rather oblique way: "I auditioned for a really famous director once who looked at my photo, which was like an old photo that had been given to him, and commented on how I must have been eating a lot of Southern food recently," Winstead said. "I told him I was from the South and he was like, 'Oh, I see you've been eating a lot of Southern fried cooking since this picture was taken.' And that was before my audition. I was just like, 'Yep. Yep, yeah. I have.'"

When Game of Thrones actress Lena Headey sat down with co-star Maisie Williams for The Edit, she revealed a particularly nasty tidbit from earlier in her career: "When I was in my twenties, and 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***?'" We can't imagine anyone would want to say that now to the woman who portrays the fearsome Queen Cersei.