Minnie Driver Gets Real About Hollywood’s Double Standards

Minnie Driver with Lake Bell at the Women In Film brunch on Monday. Photo: Getty

When Jane Rosenthal summoned female movie makers to Coach’s annual Women In Film brunch on Monday at the Tribeca Film Festival, she made a simple rule to encourage collaboration and sisterhood: “Talk to someone for three minutes, then go meet the next person.”

And so it was that Ellen Burstyn and Alison Pill talked in one corner, Gaby Hoffmann and Lake Bell hovered near the coffee bar, and we found ourselves face-to-face with ‘90s movie icon Minnie Driver, clad in Peter Pilotto (“I’m a bit obsessed with them”) and dangerously sharp Casadei heels.

Yahoo Style: Your movie Beyond the Lights is iTunes featured download this week… but it was overlooked during awards season, which felt really wrong.

Minnie Driver: The fact that both the critics at the New York Times said the same thing, and now you at Yahoo are saying that makes me feel happy and slightly vindicated.

YS: Why do you think Gugu Mbatha Raw didn’t get a nomination, either for your movie or for Belle?

MD: I truly don’t know. I’d like to know!… But you know, what I’ve learned by having made 50 odd films in my career? Not everybody is going to see your work, and it’s fantastically frustrating, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do your work. Because if you believe in a project, you have to do it.

YS: Do actresses have to produce their own films, just to make sure they get seen?

MD: I wish I could just be an actress, but I don’t think I can anymore. I think you have to get involved in all areas. You have to write. You have to produce. You have to find a way, and your voice has to be that much louder than that of a man’s, and that’s the sad truth. Barack Obama is still talking about freaking equal pay for women in 2015. F–k that.

YS: So the pay gap is real for movie stars, too?

MD: Oh yes. From time immemorial, women have had to frame what we do cannily, with extreme patience, and with extreme forbearance and bravery. It hasn’t changed that much now. We still have to speak louder. We have to come together more coherently than men do… and we have to do it in heels and pretty clothes! I did not wear ugly shoes today just because it was raining, for example.

YS: Can we rewind for a moment? When you got the part in Circle of Friends, were you insulted that the part was, supposedly, “the ugly girl”?

MD: No, I was so excited. I was constantly searching for the right parts, like most girls who don’t fit the mold of being classically beautiful—which I do not. I had that conflict of, “I love what I am, and I also see that it’s not the prettiest thing out there.” But I was always interested in the currency of whatever it was that I had, because I felt so passionate and so real, and I couldn’t disqualify that in my youthful hope and hubris. I couldn’t dismiss myself completely. But I definitely was “the fat girl.”

YS: You were not.

MD: Yes I was. When we went out to the pub, Geraldine [O’Rawe] and Saffron [Burrows]—when we’d go out at night, the cute boys would come ask them out. And I would literally be left with the lumpen, zitty boy who got stuck with me going, like, “Should I buy you a pint and a sausage?!” And I was like, “Oh, no thanks, I’m good!”

YS: What was the film industry telling you about your looks?

MD: The beautiful casting director of Circle of Friends, she was a magnificent woman, honestly, and she meant this kindly. She said, “Minnie, you’re so wonderful in this film, but you must know, I want you to know now, that Saffron is going to get all the attention for this film. You’re going to be a wonderful actor but you mustn’t mind that this is going to happen. It’s okay, because Saffron is beautiful and talented and great, and you’re just very… different. And I love Saff, and I think she’s one of the most beautiful people that I’ve ever seen, still to this day. But I remember going, “Yeah, okay, I know you’re right, Saffron will get all the attention.” But I also remember being like, “Yeah, but don’t f—ing count me out!”

YS: And then you got all the attention.

MD: I did. But it was because when I arrived in Hollywood with that film, I was no longer 160 pounds. I was 125 pounds and 5’10, which was not really on purpose; it was just me growing up in a way. I shed all that weight because it was always puppy fat, anyway! So I was 24, and in two years, a lot about my looks had changed, and I think that caught the attention of Hollywood, I’m rather ashamed to say. The fact that I looked more like a leading lady then, it’s partly why I got roles.

YS: How did your experience not looking like a leading lady shape those roles?

MD: Well, I’ve always been able to play really great parts that aren’t about just being pretty, and I’m proud of that. I’ll always be more grateful and proud of that than anything, and it’s why I keep acting. Because of those roles.

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