America Ferrera has reacted to young girls performing her emotional monologue from the Barbie movie.
In a recent interview with People, the 39-year-old Superstore actor revealed that she met a “young girl” who said that she used her monologue from the film — which touched upon the “impossible” task of being a modern woman — to audition for her local theatre program.
While Ferrera noted that she found it “hilarious,” at the same time, she said that she found it “super sad that 11-year-old girls resonate with that monologue and already feel like they know what it’s saying”.
The emotional speech marks a pivotal point in director Greta Gerwig’s summer blockbuster when Ferrera’s character — a Mattel employee named Gloria — uplifts and comforts Margot Robbie‘s Barbie, telling her that she is good enough despite the societal pressures that may suggest otherwise. She launches into an impassioned, incisive monologue that cuts to the core of how it’s “literally impossible to be a woman” in this day and age.
“You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line,” Gloria tells the Barbies in the film. “It’s too hard, it’s too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.”
The speech ultimately strikes a chord and inspires the Barbies to take a stand against the Kens and their patriarchal brainwashing of Barbie Land, but it wasn’t just Barbie that was moved; Ferrera said that mothers have gone up to tell her how much the speech meant to them. She explained: “I’ve had a lot of moms come to me and say: ‘I was watching with my kids, and afterward they said, Why were you crying?’”
At a recent Q&A, Gerwig — who co-wrote and directed the film — said many of the films’ crew members were moved to tears by the monologue, saying that she “would watch people stop what they were doing and just start sobbing” as Ferrera would go through different takes.
Gerwig added that between her fellow co-writer and now-husband Noah Baumbach, she was the one who ultimately wrote the tear-jerking monologue. However, the creation was also the product of collaborating with Ferrera. In conversation with The Cut, she revealed that she and Ferrera “would text each other anything related to it” as they finetuned the monologue throughout a couple of months before they finally reached what ended up in the film.
“It’s one of the first things Greta mentioned to me even before I read the script,” Ferrera told Vanity Fair, “She said: ‘I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I’ve always imagined you saying this.’”
“I read the monologue and it hit me as powerful and meaningful,” she continued. “It also felt like: ‘Wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful.’ But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn’t want to mess up.”
Barbie ultimately came out on top at the box office over the Barbeinheimer weekend, leading it to not only become the biggest debut ever for a film directed by a woman but also become 2023’s highest-grossing film and Warner Bros’s biggest movie ever.
