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- December 2, 2023
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America Ferrera hasn’t yet come face-to-face with any of the women who have memorized her stirring Barbie speech about the complexity of modern femininity—but she expects that such encounters are coming.
“I’ve seen lots of videos online of people learning the monologue and doing the monologue,” Ferrera told Vanity Fair at the Women in Film Honors gala on Thursday, where she received the Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award. “The only person I’ve heard do it verbatim was Ariana Greenblatt, the actress who played my daughter. She had heard it so many times by the end of filming it that she repeated it back to me—and it actually made me cry!”
Ferrera may not have expected that before the night was over she’d witness Fonda herself recite a few choice snippets from that zeitgeist-tapping monologue written by Greta Gerwig, as the icon presented Ferrera with her namesake award.
Alluding to Ferrera’s breakout role in Real Women Have Curves, Fonda also proclaimed that “real women stand up and speak for what’s right, even when it makes the powers that be—usually men—uncomfortable, maybe especially when it makes the powers that be uncomfortable. She’s there for climate change, for women’s rights, reproductive rights, democracy, voting rights, immigrant rights, and always human rights. I’ve never been happier to say the words on a stage: I love America!”
Female empowerment was downright palpable in Hollywood’s Ray Dolby Ballroom during WIF’s 50th annual celebration, a sensation Ferrera’s gotten increasingly used to.
“It has been amazing to sit back and watch Barbie land in the culture, not just here but globally. And to see what it means to women to be celebrated, and to talk about some hard realities but through joy and through the color pink, and intelligent storytelling that is about women and by women. But it’s for everybody,” she said. “The incredible success of Barbie and the genius of Greta and Margot [Robbie] is a win for all of us. It’s a win for the argument that we have to make all the time: that women storytellers should be empowered and given creative power to tell stories the way that they want to tell stories, and that it’s enough for women to tell stories about women for women the way that men have told stories about men for men.”
Flamin’ Hot director Eva Longoria, who shared the Crystal Award for Advocacy with screenwriter Linda Yvette Chávez, told Vanity Fair that she views her behind-the-camera success less as a victory lap and more as a way to tell more stories about the underrepresented Latino community.
“I think I’ve always had confidence and I’ve always believed in my talent. But to have the opportunity to aggregate the team that I did and the actors that I did for this story, that was the magic,” said Longoria. “We have a very important job in Hollywood: Hollywood defines what heroes look like. And they never look like us in the Latino community. So to be able to put a hero up on screen that looked like my dad and sounded like my uncle, that’s important for our culture.”
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