Thread by @BuzzFeed

“I was starting what...became my bigger mission in life — of questioning why women were written certain ways on film.” —Reese Witherspoon buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1…

It's really no secret that the representation of women on screen still has a long way to go. In fact, in 2020, the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film found that the percentage of top-grossing films in the US that featured a female protagonist actually dropped.

However, there are plenty of women in Hollywood who are fighting for more and better representation in movies and on TV — both on camera and behind it.

Here are 18 times famous women fought for better representation in film:

When Halle Berry first got the Bruised script, "it was written for a 25-year-old Irish Catholic girl," but she convinced the producers to "reimagine it for a middle-aged Black woman" and let her direct it.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, she said, "I slept on [the idea of directing this movie] overnight, and I woke up thinking, 'Yes, I can.' I knew I'd worked harder than I ever worked in my entire life on a character..."

"...and the last thing I wanted was for all of that work to be for naught and mistakenly fall into the hands of a visionary who didn't see it quite the way I saw it."

When Meryl Streep was preparing to audition for Kramer vs. Kramer (which is based on an anti-feminist novel), she felt that the script had its lead female character Joana all wrong...

...and if they wanted her for the role, they'd need to rewrite the part to make Joana a more realistic and sympathetic reflection of the struggles women like her face.

Streep's conviction and deep understanding of Joana won her the lead role. It was her idea that Joana give her "somebody's wife" speech before revealing to her ex-husband that she planned to take their son back.

She went on to win her first Oscar for the role.

Tessa Thompson pitched the idea of making Valkyrie openly bisexual (like she is in the comics) in Thor: Ragnarok to director Taika Waititi, and even though the scene confirming her character's sexuality on screen was cut, Tessa confirmed it to her fans.

She was also intentional about playing Valkyrie as a bisexual character. She told Rolling Stone, "There’s a great shot of me falling back from one of my sisters who’s just been slain. In my mind, that was my lover.”

Gemma Chan, who was targeted by internet trolls when she played Bess of Hardwick in Mary Queen of Scots bc she isn't white, called out the long history of actors of color only being allowed "to play their own race", even losing out on those roles to white actors in racist makeup.

Lupita Nyong'o worked with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler to ensure Nakia was "more than just the love interest" and had her own agency and space in the story apart from T'Challa.

Nyong'o told the Hollywood Reporter, "One of the things we worked on was making her part and parcel of the main argument of the story, about whether to keep the borders open. At the heart of it, she’s an activist, which is a spirit I relate to."

Mindy Kaling created Never Have I Ever and the character Devi Vishwakumar because, as she told Elle, "we are programmed to see Asian girls in a certain way on teen shows.”

The show is loosely based on Kaling's own teenage experience.

Katherine Hepburn was one of the first women in Hollywood to wear pants, both on screen & off.

There's a legend that Hepburn's costume department once stole her pants, & , refusing to put on a skirt, she walked around in her underwear until the pants were returned to her.

And finally, after her movie Thelma and Louise released in 1991, Geena Davis believed the press reaction that "it was going to change everything and that there were now going to be far more female lead characters in movies"...

...but as that promise failed to materialize, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004 to investigate the portrayal of women in film.

She told the Guardian, "The bigger picture is that gender discrimination and harmful stereotypes still dominate on screen. This undermines girls and young women and has a negative impact on their aspirations to leadership in all walks of life.”

You can read the full article here! ⬇️ buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1…