Winona Ryder Was Bullied by Casting Directors for Being 'the Ugly Girl'

We all know that people are more often than not judged by their looks, but in the movie industry, young actors have it even worse than the general public does. If someone’s not found attractive enough, their career is typically stillborn: they won’t be getting good roles, they’ll fail auditions, and so on. Hopeless scenario, really.

Some casting directors even consider it “kind” to notify such actors in advance that they’re not good-looking enough for the industry. Perhaps, they see it as helping the young folks avoid future pain and disappointment they deem inevitable, who knows? The fact is, many promising performers’ careers have been destroyed this way.

Winona Ryder almost joined their ranks as the actress was considered “ugly.”

Yeap, you read it right: the woman who’s now seen as one of Hollywood’s most timeless beauties was collecting rejections and insults for her looks in bunches.

She was getting the weirdest gigs and promised to have no future in the movie industry due to how unattractive she was considered, and that almost killed her career.

For the longest time, Winona was getting the roles of unattractive and/or ugly girls at best, and it was explicitly stated in her scripts: no one cared enough to sugarcoat it.

“If I showed you scripts from my first few movies, the descriptions of the characters all said “the ugly girl.” Starting with the character I played in Lucas; she was described as homely, unattractive,” shared Winona Ryder.

If you thought that getting a script that calls your character ugly is bad, here’s the worst part: once, a casting director told her there was no chance for her to become a real actress. She was told that she should go back to wherever she came from.

“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,'” admitted Ryder.

Well, the tables have turned dramatically since then, and these days, Winona Ryder’s largely considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses ever.

But while her story came out well in the end, there are thousands of young people who get the same kind of attitude, and we’ll never even learn about them. Isn’t this heartbreaking?

Source: Interview Magazine