Emily Ratajkowski is sharing why she decided to quit her acting career.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times published Thursday, the model, actress and author reflected on her decision to step away from acting after starring in varied roles alongside actors like Ben Affleck, Amy Schumer and Zac Efron.
Ratajkowski’s breakout role was in 2014’s Gone Girl, in which she played the mistress to Affleck’s Nick. She went on to star opposite Efron in We Are Your Friends, Schumer in I Feel Pretty and Marc Maron in Easy. Her last audition was for Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, but the part went to Charlbi Dean Kriek, who died last year.
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However, despite her and her team working hard at the time to find roles that showcased how she was a “serious actress with longevity,” Ratajkowski told the outlet, “I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, I’m an artist performing and this is my outlet.’ I felt like a piece of meat who people were judging, saying, ‘Does she have anything else other than her [breasts]?'”
Tired of making herself “digestible to powerful men in Hollywood,” she fired her manager, acting agent and commercial rep in 2020, a decision that stemmed from not being able to “trust them.”
She explained, “I was like, ‘I can handle receiving phone calls. I’m gonna make these decisions. None of you have my best interest at heart. And you all hate women.'”
Ratajkowski further reflected on the treatment of women in Hollywood in an essay she penned for her best-seller My Body. In the essay, Ratajkowski wrote about going to a WME party with her now ex-husband Sean Bear-McClard. She recalled his agent, who she wrote was “clearly drunk,” told her she was so famous that she was “like Pamela Anderson before the hep C.”
“I thought about the way that [Bear-McClard] had glided through the room, a room full of men who only two years before had been kissing Harvey Weinstein’s ring and encouraging their young female clients to take meetings with him in hotel rooms,” she wrote in her essay. “I hated that my husband was at all connected to these men.” (Bear-McClard has reportedly been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct.)
“And maybe that’s why right now I’m not really interested in men’s POVs,” she told the L.A. Times. “Because they were lies. And I don’t mean infidelity. This is a fucked up world. Like, Hollywood is fucked up. And it’s dark.”
She continued, “Obviously, it would be nice to be with somebody who’s in the industry or understands it, but I don’t think I can. That was what that essay was about … I had a hard time even being at a party like that. But then having a part of me that was so connected to it was even harder.”
Ratajkowski currently hosts the podcast High Low With EmRata, where she welcomes guests to discuss everything from feminism to sex, politics and TikTok.
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