11 Casting Director Moments From Hell That Made Actors Feel Small, Uncomfortable, Or Just Plain Icky

1.Anna Kendrick had a comment made about her breasts.

Anna Kendrick made her directorial debut with the 2023 film Woman of the Hour, which she also starred in. Despite the thriller being based on true events involving serial killer Rodney Alcala, Anna drew inspiration from her personal life for some scenes.

“There’s this scene at the beginning where I’m in a casting office, and I stole little things from my real life,” Anna said on The View. “There’s a moment where they ask me if I do nudity, and they make this really weird specific comment about my body that’s lifted verbatim from a thing that happened to me when I was 19.”

In the scene, Anna's character Sheryl Bradshaw is attending a casting call. After letting the casting director know she wasn't comfortable with nudity, one man stared directly at her chest and responded, "I'm sure they're fine." Anna confirmed that was a direct quote from a casting director to her about two decades ago.

“I was just like, ‘Oh, do you guys mind saying this thing?’ I wasn’t sure I was gonna keep it in the movie. It’s funny in the movie. We can all laugh at my humiliation. That’s funny. We’re allowed.”

2.Judi Dench was told her face was all wrong.

Jeff Spicer / Getty Images, Mirrorpix / Getty Images

Back in 1960s, a young Judi Dench was trying to expand her career by moving from the stage to the big screen, when an unnamed film director attempted to kill her dreams. After an audition, the director told her, “Well, it's been very nice meeting you, but I'm sorry, not this film," Judi said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. "Probably not any film. As you have every single thing wrong with your face.”

"Well, I got to do a few films after that, so I'm very pleased he was wrong,” she added.

That director couldn't have been more wrong because, in addition to the accolades she racked up with plays, Judi also went on to win an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, four British Academy Television Awards, and six BAFTAs. She also starred in two films I adore: Chocolat and Notes on a Scandal.

3.Sheryl Lee Ralph was told she wasn't enough.

While taking a trip down memory lane, Emmy Award-winning actor Sheryl Lee Ralph opened up to AARP about her journey to stardom as a Black woman in Hollywood. Although she's often known for having a positive disposition whenever you speak to her, Sheryl's road to the top wasn't a simple one. She reflected on a time she was fired from a TV pilot.

"I will never forget," Sheryl said. "One producer — I went to work. I did the table read. I went home and I had been fired. When I called and I asked why, and he said, 'Well, to tell you the truth, you're just not Black enough.'"

"I was like, wow. Wow," Sheryl said as she looked down at the skin color on her hands. "I was really very stunned. Then I remember coming back to Hollywood after a very successful run of Dreamgirls on Broadway, and the big-time Hollywood casting director looked at me and he said, 'Well, everybody knows you're a beautiful, talented Black girl, but what do I do with a beautiful, talented Black girl? Do I put you in a movie with Tom Cruise? Does he kiss you? [mimics a grossed-out expression] Ugh, who goes to see that movie?'"

Sheryl knew that person was trying to "break" her spirit, so she decided to view his comment in a different light.

"I had to rethink what he said to me. And I said, wait a minute, everybody knows I'm a beautiful, talented Black girl, and I should be in a movie with the likes of Tom Cruise, and he should kiss me. And I said, yeah, that's right, here we go!"

4.Charlize Theron was invited to an intimate audition.

When Charlize was starting out in the business, she remembers being asked to do a one-on-one audition at a director's home. She quickly realized she needed to remove herself from the icky situation.

“I thought it was a little odd that the audition was on a Saturday night at his house in Los Angeles, but I thought maybe that was normal,” she told Marie Claire in 2005.

“He was in his Hugh Hefner pajamas; I go inside, and he's offering me a drink, and I'm thinking, ‘My god, this acting stuff is very relaxed.’ But it soon becomes very clear what the situation was. I was like, ‘Not going to happen! Got the wrong girl, buddy!’”

5.Wendell Pierce had a casting director who didn't even know Black people existed.

Wendell, who's widely known for starring in projects like The Wire, Suits, Waiting to Exhale, Death of a Salesman on Broadway, and more, shot to fame for his exceptional work on the stage, as well as the small and big screen. He recounted times his race was called into play in Hollywood with the New York Times in 2016:

"In 1985, I’m sitting in the casting office of a major studio," Wendell told the New York Times. "The head of casting said, 'I couldn’t put you in a Shakespeare movie, because they didn’t have Black people then.' He literally said that. I told that casting director, You ever heard of Othello? Shakespeare couldn’t just make up Black people. He saw them.”

But that wasn't the only startling incident he witnessed: "I was working on The Gregory Hines Show that depicted three generations of Black men. It was on CBS in 1997. [After] the read-through, the studio, and network give notes. Gregory kissed everybody, and so in the show he would kiss his son, Matty. This particular day someone from CBS said, 'I notice every time you come in, you kiss Matty. So I wanted to ask, do Black people kiss their kids?' That was the most offensive thing I think I’ve ever [heard]. Gregory stood up and said [to the executive]: 'Everybody get out. You, come with me.'"

6.Thandiwe Newton was asked to play with herself.

For W magazine, Thandiwe recalled a traumatic experience she dealt with as a teen actor with an unnamed male director during a callback audition.

“A director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my tits and think about the guy making love to me in the scene. I thought, ‘Okay, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room, and I’d done weird stuff before, so I did it.”

She would later discover that same director had been sharing that video with friends in the industry. Thandiwe was approached by a drunk producer at the Cannes Film Festival who said, "Oh, Thandiwe, I’ve seen you recently," and walked away looking shocked that he even said it.

Her husband, director Ol Parker, approached the man to find out what he meant by it. "It turns out," Thandiwe continued. "The director was showing that audition tape to his friends after poker games at his house. And they would all get off on it.”

7.America Ferrera was told to become a Latina caricature.

America has always been open about her treatment in Hollywood as an actor, which is why she had no problem sharing what her first audition was like:

"My very first audition ever," America told the New York Times. "I was about 16, and the casting director [for a commercial] said, 'Can you do it again but sound more Latino?' I had no idea what she was talking about. You mean you want me to speak in Spanish? She’s like, 'No. Do it in English but just sound more Latino.' I genuinely didn’t realize until later that she was asking me to speak English with a broken accent. It confused me because I thought I am Latino, so isn’t this what a Latino sounds like? From the get-go of my career, I thought, there’s a certain box or a certain way that you’re seen, which I didn’t feel growing up."

8.Queen Latifah was made to believe her weight was an issue.

Queen Latifah has been a household name in Hollywood for years, from her illustrious rap career to her notable roles onscreen, but that doesn't mean she's escaped the Hollywood pressure to adhere to certain beauty standards. She reflected on a time when her weight was called into question.

"We helped create Living Single," Queen said on Red Table Talk. "When you look at that picture, you see four different women, four different shades, four different types, and we looked like four women who would live in Brooklyn. And that's who we were supposed to be representing,"

"And we loved being able to do that," she continued. "Because we rocked brands that nobody was rocking. We had all kind of guests on our show that had never been on TV before — rappers and actors and just cool people. But the word came down that we needed to lose weight," she recalled, irritated by the memory. "We're on the No. 1 show among Black and Latino households in America, and you're telling us we need to lose weight? Maybe you're the one with the problem."

9.Keira Knightley was told to make sex faces.

During an interview on The Graham Norton Show, Keira shared a very interesting detail about the audition process for her 2011 historical drama A Dangerous Method. Although she was prepared for the unusual ask, it still didn't make the experience less embarrassing.

"Yeah, I had to go on Skype with David Cronenberg so that he could see what my planned weird sex faces were. No, it's awful on every level, because I'd never met him before. So, like, to say, 'Hello, nice to meet you,' and then all of a sudden have to go, 'Hey, what are your sex faces?'"

"I'd been practicing in the mirror just before, which is just weird."

And if that wasn't awkward enough, Keira revealed the Skype meeting froze while she was making one of her intentionally bad sex faces.

10.Kat Dennings was told she was "ugly" as a kid.

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images for Disney, Steve Granitz / WireImage

In an interview with People, Kat opened up about her decades-long experience in the business and how she never allowed rude comments to impact her self-esteem. She recalls casting directors being "very cruel" even when they were "talking about a child."

"The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now," she said. "There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback, and people would not hold back."

"It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I'm like, 'How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane.' For example, I was 12. I'd go into an audition, and I'd do it, and my manager would call me, and I'd be like, 'How'd it go?' And they'd be like, 'Well, they thought you weren't pretty enough and you're fat.'"

But even at a young age, Kat had a very strong sense of self. "That was my attitude. For some reason, it didn't break my spirit. I was like, 'I'll show them,'" she added. "I guess props to my parents, because they were like, 'They're idiots. Don't listen to them.' And I was like, 'They're idiots, I'm not.'"

11.Lastly, George Lazenby was forced to have sex with an audience.

Australian actor George Lazenby was the first to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. Although he looked the part, at the time, the 28-year-old didn't have any professional acting experience, so producers decided to test him. He passed the acting and fighting trials, but now they wanted to make sure their newest hero wasn't gay.

According to the NY Post, “A male employee brought up girls on separate occasions and stayed while Lazenby made love to them,” wrote Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, authors of Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films, a comprehensive account of the James Bond series.

“I’m really looking forward to being Bond, for the bread and the birds,” George said. “It’s not that I’m a sex maniac. Forget my ego. I wouldn’t even care if they didn’t put my name on the marquee.”

He would go on to only star in one film: On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.