Barbie’s America Ferrera recently revealed something that brings her joy — and it definitely threw fans for a loop.
“My guilty pleasure would be … I’m going to really regret saying this … It’s not showering for a few days,” Ferrera, 39, shared in a Vanity Fair interview on Wednesday, July 19, which featured Barbie costars Margot Robbie, Kate McKinnon and Issa Rae along with director Greta Gerwig.
Before admitting her secret indulgence, the cast had some other guesses as to what it might be. Gerwig, 39, said, “Oh, I bet a massage or something?” while Rae, 38, asked it if was “being away from her children.” “Not showering,” however, came as a shock. “I would never have expected that,” Robbie quipped.
Ferrera — who stars in the upcoming summer blockbuster as a real-world Mattel worker Gloria — recently revealed that she’s grateful to play a human and not a doll in the Barbie movie.
“I didn’t want to be one of the Barbies, that wouldn’t have been as compelling to me,” she explained in a Tuesday, July 18, interview with Digital Spy. “To me, the message of this movie is that there is no one standard of beauty, there’s no right way to be beautiful, one right way to smart, one right way to be even Barbie. We can embrace ourselves uniquely and celebrate that.”
The Ugly Betty actress also revealed how she landed the role of Gloria in the highly-anticipated film.
“It was kind of a miracle. Things like this have rarely, if ever, happened in my career, where you just get a phone call from some fabulous director who says, ‘I have a part and I want you to play it,’” Ferrera gushed to the Los Angeles Times in a Thursday, July 20, interview. “Exploring it through Gloria’s eyes just felt like a magical gift that we never get in our culture — and if we do get it, we have to make it, we have to create it and we have to push for why it matters. So to get the script was just unexpected. Really, my first thought was, ‘They’re never gonna let [Gerwig] make this.”
Ferrera appears alongside a star-studded cast in the Barbie movie which includes Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, respectively, as well as McKinnon, Rae, Will Ferrell, Michael Cera and Simu Liu. Recently, Robbie confessed that she had one dealbreaker before agreeing to play the titular doll in Gerwig’s upcoming movie.
“If [Mattel] hadn’t made that change to have a multiplicity of Barbies, I don’t think I would have wanted to attempt to make a Barbie film,” she said in a Time magazine cover story in June. “I don’t think you should say, ‘This is the one version of what Barbie is, and that’s what women should aspire to be and look like and act like.”
Before Gerwig agreed to helm the film, Barbie was initially set to be rewritten by Diablo Cody with Amy Schumer in the lead role. After exiting the movie in 2017 citing scheduling conflicts, Schumer, 42, later announced that she left the production because she didn’t like how it was shaping up.
“I can’t wait to see the movie, it looks awesome,” Schumer said during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen in June. “I think we said it was scheduling conflicts, that’s what we said. But yeah, it really was just creative differences. But, you know, there’s a new team behind it, and it looks like it’s very feminist and cool, so I will be seeing the movie.”
Barbie hits theaters on Friday, July 21.
