America Ferrera reveals ‘Barbie’ monologue scene took up to 50 takes
America Ferrera has shared that her Barbie monologue scene took somewhere between 30 to 50 takes to film.
The actor plays Mattel executive Gloria in the new Greta Gerwig-directed film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and revealed that one of the most pivotal sequences of dialogue – about the double standards women face – was a huge undertaking on set.
“It worked on the page, and so I definitely wanted to give that feeling to the audience as the person performing it— to make it resonate the way that it did with me when I read the words on the page,” Ferrera told Vanity Fair.
The actor then revealed that shooting for the scene took two days. “It’s one part of a much bigger scene with lots of characters in it. I had to do it many, many times for other people’s coverage and to get through the whole scene and over the course of two days,” she said. “But [Greta] gave me so much freedom with it.”
She continued: “There were moments in shooting the movie where Greta really had written something in a very specific way that she heard a very specific way in her head with particular cadence in a particular speed or a particular inflection. I thought maybe this would be like that, but it was the opposite. She wanted me to completely make it my own and find it as we did it.”
The actor said that while it “felt like” 500 takes, it was probably closer to 30 to 50 “full runs”. “By the end, Ariana [Greenblatt] recited the monologue to me because she had memorised it because that’s how many times I had said it.”
Ferrera said that “every take was different”, explaining: “There were takes that leaned into anger. There were takes that leaned into laughter. It really did, over the course of filming, find a shape. It was about just staying as present in the moment and just seeing really where the words would take it.”
Meanwhile, Robbie recently explained why she made casting Rob Brydon a “priority” in Barbie.
It was also recently reported that Barbie‘s marketing budget was more than it actually cost to make the film itself.
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Hollie Geraghty
NME
