Chloë Grace Moretz reflected on her experiences navigating the movie industry in Hollywood as a child/teen star.
The actor, now 25, was only six when she nabbed her first movie role in Heart of the Beholder before forging a hugely successful acting career in movies such as Kick-Ass, Carrie, If I Stay, and the recent sci-fi series The Peripheral.
However, while her acting endeavours have been seriously impressive, it hasn’t come without hiccups along the way, as Chloë explained that she was continuously “shot down” by older men who were “unhappy with a young woman” in her position when trying to bring ideas about her characters to the table in meetings.
Speaking on the Reign With Josh Smith podcast, the American actress explained: “It was always odd from my first leading role when I was 14 in Carrie. It was always really interesting to see who would be really unhappy with a young woman.” Chloe added: “At that point, I had already worked for so many years – almost ten years – and as I continued through having more important roles on set as I grew up, it was always very interesting to see the pushback that I would get from a lot of people.”
The star continued: “The majority of it was older men for sure who would infantilize me. If I had real things to bring to the table, a lot of the time, it would get shot down.” She went on to acknowledge that it was a “really wild power struggle” as a young child who had already been working for as long as she had but was “still a kid in every sense of the word”.
“I felt like I was always really fighting against trying to figure out how to conduct myself in a way that I’ll be respected, so I can be respected on set and given the credit that I felt that I deserved,” she said. “To have a voice in the same game when I’m playing characters that are my age, I’m advocating for female characters of my exact age at the time. And having to even advocate to an older man on behalf of your 14-, 15-, 16-year-old self is a really, really crazy kind of mindf***.”
Barry King
The Greta actress went on to reveal that she learned how to change her approach when dealing with these older men when it came to considering her ideas seriously.
“It taught me how to propose questions and in a way to make the ideas their ideas, so then it would come back around and be like, ‘Oh my god, what a novel idea that you have on behalf of my character that I totally did not propose to you in no special way,'” Chloë Grace Moretz said. “It was an interesting dynamic, and as I grew up and as my characters grew up, I always had to be very sweet and very kind of back-footed in the way that I proposed things, but strong.”