It’s been a hot pink Barbie weekend and America Ferrera (aka Gloria, a Mattel employee) is one of the major reasons for the film’s success with a viral monologue that has been generating Oscar buzz.
Gloria crosses paths with Barbie after her trip into the real world during the onset of an existential crisis. Later in the film, Gloria and her daughter Sasha go to Barbie Land, where Gloria gives an impassioned monologue that explains the realities of womanhood to the rest of the characters in the film.
Of course, pulling off a cinematic moment like this takes hard work and dedication. America Ferrera spoke to Vanity Fair the day before the SAG-AFTRA strike and revealed that she did that scene an estimated 30 to 50 times over a period of two days even thought it felt like “500 takes.”
Per Ferrera, the monologue is part of a scene involving multiple characters. There had to be extensive takes so that every character could be shown in the scene during the film’s final cut. And they ran through it so much that Ariana Greenblatt, who plays her on-screen daughter, “had memorized it because that’s how many times I had said it.”
The actor also told Vanity Fair that seeing the monologue for the first time “…felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn’t want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it.” That pressure was made even more intense by the fact that director Greta Gerwig thought of America when writing the speech. “She said, ‘I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I’ve always imagined you saying this.’”
Clearly, the practice paid off as America Ferrera knocked it out of the park with moviegoers not being able to get it out of their heads hours or days after seeing it.
America Ferrera also spoke to Digital Spy and said, “Greta and I spent months talking about it and preparing for it. And I had a blast doing it. She gave me so much freedom to explore and try it a bunch of different ways.”
Haven’t watched Barbie yet? Read the speech below.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Barbie being covered here wouldn’t exist.