"More and more women of every shape, size, color and age need to just start creating their own [stuff] — to make a door for ourselves to walk through,” says Julianna Margulies (left). She was photographed with (from left) Sarah Paulson, Jennifer Lopez, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Constance Zimmer and Kirsten Dunst on March 21 at Line 204 Studios in Los Angeles. Read more here.
Lopez snapped a selfie behind the scenes at the roundtable.
Seven of TV’s top drama actresses pull back the curtain — along with the punches — on Hollywood’s narrow parameters, nudity "reparations" and "how much more well-behaved we have to be than men."
"On UnREAL, we have two female leads, female showrunners and writers, and it’s very driven toward us being empowered, which is definitely different," said Zimmer. "We can treat the men a bit like how we may have been treated earlier in our careers or just as women in general. It’s fun to watch the tables be turned and to see the guys on set eating lettuce."
"I got a moniker of being 'the diva,' which I never felt I deserved — which I don't deserve," said Lopez (NBC's Shades of Blue).
"It was the Producers Guild that gave me a hard time," said Margulies (The Good Wife). "To try to prove my job to them in order for them to accept me as a producer? I still don't think I'm in the Producers Guild, and it's been three years"
"Confirmation was a different story because I was part of that from the very beginning, before we had a script," said Washington. "I was on as an executive producer, and I said to my co-producers, 'If you want me on as a vanity producer, I'm not interested in doing this project with you. I have real opinions and passionate ideas about how this is supposed to go.'"
"I'm pretty much down for anything if the director is good," said Dunst (FX's Fargo).
“I think it’s changing, but we still have so far to go when you talk about telling different stories," said King. "If the story is about a woman, why does it have to be a white woman?”
"I've never been asked to play the [romantic] leading lady without having to be a blonde," said Paulson (FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, American Horror Story: Hotel).
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘I just want to work with women. I’m done, I don’t want to work with all these dudes all the time,” says Dunst (right).
"I've always been fascinated by how much more well-behaved we have to be than men," said Lopez.