My first experience of sexism in showbusiness came early, when I was 19. I was invited to the director’s house for dinner, just the two of us. He cooked. It was delicious. He’d had practice, to be fair, being in his 50s. After dinner he asked how I felt about nudity. Another role in the project we were working on had involved nudity, so it didn’t feel a strange question, being 19 and ever so keen.
“Oh, but your story needed it,” I gushed. “It was brilliantly done.”
“But would you ever get naked?” he asked.
“Yes!” I said. “Of course, if the story needed it.”
He looked at me. He smiled. “Go on then,” he said, gently. “If you think you could, why don’t you just take your clothes off right now?”
Bang. Suddenly I remembered my male co-star tutting when I told him I was having this meeting. Shit. “Oh, OK, it’s just,” and this is 100% what I said, “it’s just… I’ve got a little bit of period left.”
“OK, don’t bother then,” he shrugged and sloped off to get coffee, leaving me feeling responsible for the weird vibes. The conversation struggled to return to its natural flow, and he started to sulk, admitting, “It feels different now, I’m embarrassed.”
And I did that thing women do, when the shame of an inappropriate proposition gets dumped on our doorstep and we feel compelled to clear the steaming mess up. Don’t feel embarrassed! I said. I don’t care! I’m a free spirit! I’m sorry I’ve got a bit of period left! I drank the coffee and got a cab home.
Did I call Equity and file a report? No. We became friends, and even though he never gave me another job, we stayed in touch and I became proud to have “understood” him; the only thing that changed was I remembered to bring a girlfriend with me every time I went to his house. It was a decade before it occurred to me what an abuse of power this had been, and how I’d normalised it: telling myself I had managed the situation well; that I hadn’t turned it into a Thing. Now I can hear the victim’s logic. Had he crossed a line into assault, would I have punished myself for not handling it well?
The truth is, most of the really appalling things in the industry happen in the audition room – and often with a female casting director supervising, facilitating the (usually) male director’s vision. If an actress’s heart doesn’t sink at the words, “There’s no script, this audition is going to be improvised”, it will thud into her guts upon hearing, “And this is Adam, he’s playing your boyfriend, Simeon.” You look at Adam-playing-Simeon, with his big grin, knowing for the next hour he can do pretty much whatever he likes, because this is a test to see how relaxed and spontaneous you are, how free – which in acting, for women, means how little you flinch when a stranger runs his hands over your body.
I spent a lot of the 90s rolling around west London flats with men I had just been introduced to, who could have picked any scenario in the world to re-enact, but picked the convenient one that we were having relationship issues, and needed to sort them out by spooning on a futon. I wouldn’t think twice when grown men filmed me, and never contacted me about the project again. The laws of improv are diametrically opposed to the laws of consent, improv needing a, “Yes, let’s” and not able to do much with a, “No, thanks, get your hands off me, you’re not my boyfriend, you’re a random bloke in zone six and I’m only here because I was told Claire Danes was attached and we would be filming in Budapest.”
The most blatant sexism I ever experienced was at Cambridge University, where I was a member of Footlights. There was a strange “one girl” policy that was eye-rolled at by all participants, who simultaneously maintained and sustained that practice. I was embraced by Footlights because, it turned out, I was quite funny and could write decent material. But the law was there: there could only ever be one girl, in every show, on every tour, in every Edinburgh festival revue.
I remember one evening holding my naked, weeping Footlights boyfriend, who was older and had ambitions of graduating with an Edinburgh show under his belt. “Please don’t audition,” he pleaded. “You’ll get in and they can only have one girl, and everyone knows the director’s girlfriend will get it, so where will that leave me?” I did audition, the relationship came to an abrupt end, and the director’s girlfriend got the gig.
After graduating, I toured a double act with the brilliant actor-writer Olivia Poulet (In The Loop, The Thick Of It). We wanted to write a sitcom about our lives as women struggling in rented accommodation with bad relationships, and produced script after script. The feedback we got was that no one wanted to see middle-class women on television, even if no one had a problem dishing out jobs to my Footlights contemporaries. One commissioner’s rejection email explained: “We know we asked for female but this seems a bit too female.”
Being sexually assaulted in a hotel room by Harvey Weinstein and getting a rejection email are very different things. But they belong in the same family: both are about exclusion, double standards and the culling of creativity. The more women’s stories are denied, the more the male gaze dominates the screen, the fewer actresses get cast, and the greater the power that lies with those who cast them. Experiencing sexual harassment is damaging and criminal; spending 10 years trying to get your work made while mediocre men fail upwards – well, that also deadens inside.
A toxic culture still exists in the industry, one in which the artistic potential of half the human race is constantly undermined. You see this when women with real power – financiers, distributors, executives and commissioners – don’t bring other women into the fold. They have internalised the notion that men can be trusted with the big budgets and big ideas, while women are a risk.
The myth of the male genius pervades science, technology and engineering; but it is noticeably relentless in the arts. I have worked with a few “genius” directors and you soon realise that, rather than a God-given calling to bark orders behind a camera, they simply have a lot more experience, with the same hit-and-miss rate as the rest of us. I recently worked with actor-writer Joanna Scanlan (No Offence, Getting On, The Thick Of It), who told me it took 17 years of development before she got her first green light. “Then I won a few major awards, and still wasn’t deemed worthy of terrestrial TV. Making TV is a collaborative process, but the history of the best of it is littered with a misallocation of responsibility in favour of men.”
The Weinstein scandal puts us at a crossroads. The wicked witch is dead, the wizard is a lie, and we have to celebrate that victory at least. It might have gone on for another 30 years. Feminists must congratulate themselves, because it is our tedious slog added to already frantic lives – the petitions, campaigns, articles, meetings, marches and painful confessions – that steers a culture to out and banish such a tyrant. But where to go from here?
Last year I was asked to join a Hollywood writers’ room, after HBO read an old script of mine. It was an eye-opener, not just because the television industry is bigger and more lucrative, but because American producers don’t see female-driven projects as a gamble. And it’s not gender equality or a diversity drive feeding the boom in storytelling such as Big Little Lies or The Handmaid’s Tale: it’s cold, hard cash. I spoke to British producer Siobhan Bachman (The Office, The Daily Show), now a successful Hollywood talent manager, who told me there has never been a better time to be a female writer in the US, because America has grasped what the UK fails to: that “women are not just the biggest percentage of overall TV viewers, they are also the primary consumers in the home. They are the target for the advertisers, and they are in charge of the remote. So programming needs to tell the stories that appeal to women.”
Meanwhile, according to industry magazine Broadcast Greenlight, the BBC commissioned 32 men and eight women to write drama for broadcast this year; four of the eight women were working on adaptations. Channel 4 has transmitted only two prime-time original drama series created by a woman since 2004: Sugar Rush, adapted from the Julie Burchill novel, in 2005; and this year’s Born To Kill. When the talent is there, and the economic argument for it, the low number of women writers brought to the screen just doesn’t make any sense – unless it’s old-fashioned sexism swinging its balls.
The screenwriter Georgia Pritchett (Veep, Miranda), who has won four Emmys and three Writers’ Guild awards, tells me she feels a comedy refugee: the last four projects she took to British broadcasters were all rejected, only to be bought by US companies. “I’ve been writing for 26 years,” she says, “and have never been in a writers’ room with another woman – until I went to America. When I’ve suggested a show with a woman in the lead, every broadcaster in England has said: ‘We already have something with women in it.’”
Harvey Weinstein created a gender divide in the industry, because a woman meeting him was playing Russian roulette while a man meeting him was just having a meeting about a movie. We need a consensus on what constitutes professionally unacceptable conduct, without being considered frigid bores. Equity could push for there to be no kissing or sex scenes in auditions, and protection for actresses when they are asked to meet for parts.
Weinstein is over. He is dust. Let his losses be our gains. In the short time I’ve been working in Hollywood, I’ve been motivated by the effective campaigning – on gender, on race – of Lena Dunham, Jessica Chastain and Ava DuVernay, and by male allies Judd Apatow, Paul Feig, Ryan Murphy and Ronan Farrow. They’ve taught me to speak up, to call people to account, to be unafraid of burning bridges. Because the truth is, the bridges aren’t there. We are going to have to build our own.
My role in last year’s Bridget Jones’s Baby was a gamechanger for me. A powerful, kind broad at the helm (Renée Zellweger), women at the top of their game writing, producing, directing (Emma Thompson, Debra Hayward, Sharon Maguire). With no risk of being molested, undermined or beaten to the best gags (as happens on male-driven shows), I finally tasted how the boys usually work. With my guard truly down, I could relax and focus; I felt for the first time, in front of the camera, that I could fly.
We need to collectively, consciously rewire our brains so we don’t look at a poster with a woman front and centre, and think, “That’ll probably be a bit shit, I’ll skip it.” Part of that is assuming women are somehow antithetical to all the naughty things we want to escape to when we finish work – sex, or danger, or desire – and that men, being freer, have a natural affinity for creating unbridled fantasy. But it’s just not true. Look at all the franchise films that are boring even the boys they were made for, then look at the dangerous eroticism of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, or the earth-shattering power of Laia Costa’s Victoria. Women making things, or being in things, doesn’t mean they’ll be a bit shit. It probably means, given the gargantuan gamut that woman has run, it’ll be fucking fantastic.
British decision makers need to have the balls to make the work, to green the lights, take the risks, get the thing over the line. Drama and comedy executives, I challenge you to commission an all-female-written slate for one year. It will be far from a feminine-fest; I guarantee you the insights into masculinity will blow your mind, since we’ve been largely silent observers for so long. We owe it to those women, the Asia Argentos and Rose McGowans who have escaped dark hotel rooms in search of something safe and redemptive, to put the creative industry back where it belongs, in a world of imagination, ambition and curiosity. We should do things differently now – lest we forget our third magic word: lights, camera, action.
• Sarah Solemani is a writer and actor whose credits include Bridget Jones’s Baby, Him & Her, Bad Education and The Wrong Mans.
