30 Stars Who Were Told They Weren't Pretty Enough for Hollywood

Selena Gomez

Although she’s an Emmy nominee, international pop star, and a Disney legend, the star of “Only Murders in the Building” has shared her insecurities with fans. During a 2013 concert in Connecticut, the then-21-year-old opened up about being told she wasn’t sexy enough for her career. She even felt the need to pull away from social media as a result of this. Given her massive influence, in pop culture and the world at large, her looks are the least of her accomplishments. Having said that, whoever’s telling her she’s not attractive enough should go get an eye exam.

Whoopi Goldberg

Even in the 1980s, an African American movie star was still something of a rarity. Whoopi Goldberg’s stardom was monumental and game-changing. But being a trailblazer left her open to attacks from ignorant and unimaginative executives, directors, and entertainment journalists. Speaking with Roger Ebert, she talked about how “Fatal Beauty” director Tom Holland openly told her she wasn’t attractive to him. She’s talked since then about her struggles being taken seriously during the early part of her career. Despite this, she had one of the most successful and consistent careers before she pivoted to taking on hot topics on “The View.”

Bella Ramsey

The history-making Emmy nominee from HBO’s “The Last of Us” has endured a lot of criticism from fans of the franchise. There’s a fine line between being a passionate fan and being horrible. These social media users crossed that line several times. Ramsey’s casting as beloved character Ellie faced attacks before the show even premiered. The initial hateful response was based purely on looks and very quickly went beyond the pale. It’s one thing to have a problem with a casting choice. It’s another thing altogether to heap abuse on a performer due to their appearance. Ramsey left social media over the constant abuse, which only intensified in the show’s second season.

Lizzy Caplan

This unforgettable performer from “Mean Girls” knows a thing or two about how cruel people can be about other people’s looks. Lizzy Caplan, who is most known for playing Janis Ian in the Tina Fey-penned high school comedy, was once told she wasn’t pretty enough to be on a WB show. Not being “WB Pretty” became a private joke between her and a friend who never landed the WB roles they auditioned for. Caplan clearly didn’t need the network to get ahead. She has since enjoyed a successful career for major outfits like Showtime and Hulu.

Elle Fanning

The entertainment industry’s obsession with performers’ looks can be a hard thing to learn. Elle Fanning was young when she found that out. During a roundtable for the Hollywood Reporter, she discussed losing a role in a comedy when she was young. She ended up finding out the discouraging reason – a decision maker on the project deemed her not sexy enough. The comment would be bad enough. But the fact that she was so young at the time and going up for an age-appropriate role only makes that reasoning so much worse.

Judi Dench

The grand dame of British acting didn’t really start making movies until she was in her 50s. It’s a testament to the adage that it’s never too late to pursue your goals. But the reason she took so long is a little sadder. Despite her many years on the stage, Judi Dench was actually discouraged from taking film roles. Though she made a couple movies in the 1960s, a director flat-out told her she had the “wrong face” for the screen. Her Oscar, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards prove otherwise. Dench, who preferred the stage anyway, said this made her wary of shifting gears.

Kate Beckinsale

Director Michael Bay clearly had a lot to say about his female lead on the set of “Pearl Harbor.” He insisted Kate Beckinsale would have to lose weight for the role. Considering the actress had just had a child and had already lost weight, she had questions about how thin a 1940s nurse would really be. The director repeated his comments about Beckinsale’s looks and weight during the press cycle for the film. Bay’s insistence that Beckinsale was pretty but not pretty enough to alienate female viewers is one of the most backhanded compliments imaginable.

Gabourey Sidibe

Earning an Oscar nomination for her film debut, the star of “Precious” dealt with her fair share of criticism for her looks. Speaking with Andy Cohen, she described a run-in with Joan Cusack before she had landed her lauded role. Cusack told her to quit the business because, in her words, it was too “image-conscious.” Sidibe’s perspective on Cusack’s advice was generous. She imagined Cusack was speaking from a place of experience. But what she faced from people who weren’t so concerned for her emotional well-being was even worse. In spite of criticism and downright abuse about her physical appearance, Sidibe flat-out doesn’t care what other people think of her body.

Emma Thompson

If there’s one actress we can trust not to suffer fools, it’s Emma Thompson. Throughout the years, she has taken on some of the most challenging roles in movies. But one type of role seems to have eluded her. During press for her 2022 comedy, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” Thompson remarked that she was rarely offered roles that called for nudity or sex scenes. She is candid, as always, about how executives, directors, and even entertainment journalists never saw hers as the kind of body they wanted to see on screen. These criticisms became even more pronounced after she stopped worrying about being thin.

Sally Field

After years of success on TV, “The Flying Nun” star was ready to take her talents to the big screen. Unfortunately, the audition process for “Smokey and the Bandit” was anything but smooth. Co-star and future partner Burt Reynolds had to fight for her to be cast, as producers felt she wasn’t sexy enough to play the movie’s quirky runaway bride. Field’s agent parroted that same sentiment when she announced she wanted to transition to movies. The agent soon became her ex-agent, and she went on to win an Oscar in spite of them all.

Kristen Bell

This popular actress from Michigan became successful at a relatively young age. She broke into the mainstream playing the titular character on “Veronica Mars,” which debuted in September of 2004. Bell had just turned 24 years old. It was shortly before this that she continuously received some rather deterring feedback. As she explains in a video for Vanity Fair, Bell was repeatedly told in auditions that she “[wasn’t] pretty enough to play the pretty girl.” It’s the kind of particularly blunt statement that Hollywood is known for. But Bell got the last laugh, and she was even included on People’s 100 Most Beautiful list in 2008.

Kesha

The music industry is a tough business, and its stars are told some terrible things. Kesha broke onto the scene in 2009 when she was featured on Flo Rida’s “Right Round,” and she later found success with solo efforts like “Tik Tok” and “We R Who We R.” Shortly after she topped the charts, Kesha was allegedly confronted by her producer, Dr. Luke, who repeatedly criticized her weight gain. He allegedly called her fat, demanded that her management team intervene, and at one point referred to her as a “refrigerator.” This caused enormous self-esteem issues in the singer, and she attended rehab for eating disorder treatment in 2014.

Minka Kelly

It’s weird that a literal model was told that she wasn’t pretty enough for Hollywood, but so is often the case in the industry. Minka Kelly was testing for a modeling agency when she attracted the attention of a Playboy Playmate. The unnamed Playmate offered to manage the young model, provided she got a ton of plastic surgery like liposuction, veneers, and a breast augmentation. She even got Kelly into a surgeon’s office, where she would work as a receptionist in exchange for the surgery. Kelly eventually declined the offer and later found success on “Friday Night Lights” playing Lyla Garrity. She would also be named Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive in 2010.

Minnie Driver

An Emmy and Oscar-nominated actress, Minnie Driver has found success in a number of TV shows and movies. She is perhaps best known for playing Skylar in “Good Will Hunting,” for which she received the aforementioned Oscar nomination. But the role also opened some personal scars. Driver has revealed that an unknown producer who worked on the movie told her that she wasn’t “hot enough” for the role. As she told The Cut, this resurrected old “insecurities” that she harbored about her physical appearance. However, both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck fought for Driver, and she was ultimately cast in the film.

Gwyneth Paltrow

Say what you will about Gwyneth Paltrow as a person, but there’s no denying that she’s beautiful. In fact, People named her the World’s Most Beautiful Woman in 2013, the same year she starred in “Iron Man 3.” Years earlier, she tried out for a role in the 1994 drama “Golden Gate” starring Matt Dillon and Joan Chen. However, she was allegedly rejected because she was considered “too plain.” But no matter. Paltrow would break out just a couple of years later with successful movies like “Seven” and “Sliding Doors,” becoming one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood.

Reese Witherspoon

This actress is so beautiful that even science agrees! Philadelphia’s Temple University School of Medicine conducted a study to determine the most objectively attractive female face. They found that women with heart-shaped faces and cheekbones as wide as their eyebrows could be considered “mathematically beautiful,” and Witherspoon was used as an example in the press. And yet, even she was deemed unsuitable for Hollywood! Witherspoon revealed in an interview with The Daily Mail that she was constantly rejected as a young actress for being “not tall enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough.” However, she credits her “stubborn” personality for getting her through the denigration.

Lea Michele

There’s an episode in “Glee” that sees Lea Michele’s Rachel Berry considering a nose job. She’s told that it’s “a rite of passage for Jewish girls,” but she ultimately decides against it. Well, this particular subplot mirrors something that Michele actually went through as a young teenager. During a talk with TODAY Style, Michele revealed that she was pressured by industry executives to get a nose job when she was just thirteen years old. According to them, it was the only way that she would be able to transition from Broadway to television. She refused, and poetically enough, it’s what may have contributed to her being cast as Rachel.

Jennifer Lawrence

This Oscar-winning actress was repeatedly told that she was too large for certain roles. She would once again be told this when it came to her being cast as Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games.” Lawrence refused to harm her body for the role, saying that she was also thinking of the damage it might cause in young girls wanting to dress up as Katniss. She feared they would believe they’d have to lose weight to look like the character if Lawrence herself looked thinner. Unfortunately, movie reviews of the “Hunger Games” also targeted the actress’s weight, with The Hollywood Reporter saying she had “lingering baby fat” and The New York Times signaling what they called her “seductive, womanly figure.”

Sarah Jessica Parker

It says a lot about Hollywood that publications host “unsexiest women” lists. Back in 2007, “Sex and the City’s” Sarah Jessica Parker was named Maxim’s No. 1 Unsexiest Woman Alive, writing that she was the “least sexy woman in a group of very unsexy women.” This unfortunate distinction came three years after the show concluded and one year before its big movie continuation, which went on to gross over $400 million. Parker later told Grazia that the classification “hurt so much” and upset her husband, Matthew Broderick. She concludes with a very mature, “I guess you can't please all people.”

Judy Garland

This iconic movie star is one of the biggest victims of the merciless Hollywood machine. Barely into her teens, Judy Garland was horrifically called a “fat little pig with pigtails,” and studios vehemently demanded that she lose weight for the big screen. She was put on a strict diet consisting of coffee, chicken soup, and cigarettes to suppress her appetite. She was also forced to take pills, both to keep her working over long hours and to ensure that she remained thin. Unfortunately, this resulted in a debilitating substance use disorder that would haunt Garland for the rest of her life.

Kate Winslet

While appearing as a speaker at We Day UK, Winslet told the audience that she was relentlessly bullied as a child and teenager for her weight and big feet, and that she was often called Blubber by her classmates. She was also allegedly told that she wasn’t attractive and that she would only make it as an actor “as long as she was happy to settle for the fat girl parts.” Despite the roadblocks, she appeared in BBC’s “Dark Season” at age 15 and subsequently won her first BAFTA at 20 for her performance as Marianne in “Sense and Sensibility.” And where are her bullies now?

Pink

Pink always comes across as an incredibly confident person, despite the fact that she’s apparently never felt conventionally attractive. While talking to Redbook, Pink said she was criticized from day one and told that she was never going to make magazine covers because she wasn’t pretty enough. Ever the badass, Pink took those harsh words and rolled with them. She told the magazine (the cover of which she adorned) that she was perfectly comfortable with not being conventionally beautiful and that she has always put more focus into other aspects of her life, such as her happiness, family, and health.

Kat Dennings

Despite having starred in a hit CBS series, Kat Dennings apparently does not consider herself a conventional “Hollywood” star. According to a New York Times report, Dennings calls herself “socially weird” and hates attending Hollywood parties. The co-creator of “2 Broke Girls,” Michael Patrick King, also stated that Dennings tended to stay in her apartment on weekends. Part of this non-Hollywood lifestyle is refusing to listen to advice. She has stated that previous casting agents have told her to fix her teeth, dye her hair, and lose weight, all of which she has refused to do. And now she’s a millionaire, so ... phooey to them.

Nia Vardalos

Nia Vardalos takes great pride in her Greek heritage and leveraged her lineage to create her most prominent role, that of Toula Portokalos in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” And her agent never saw it coming. When Vardalos was first starting out, her acting agent quit after telling her that she wasn’t pretty enough to be a leading lady and that no one was writing Greek roles. Vardalos channeled her frustration and wrote a one-woman play about a Greek wedding, which was fortuitously seen by Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks. They then helped produce the movie adaptation through Hanks’ company Playtone, and the rest is history.

Mindy Kaling

After leaving college, Mindy Kaling moved to New York and co-wrote a play about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon called “Matt & Ben.” She then moved to Los Angeles and landed a writing gig on “The Office,” where she gradually became one of the show’s most prominent supporting characters. Around this time, she was offered a sketch show at an unnamed and now-defunct network, but hear this: after being personally offered the show, she was forced to audition. For the role of herself. And she didn’t get it because she wasn’t considered attractive enough. For playing herself. Yeah, wrap your head around that one. Suffice it to say, Kaling flourished in spite of the experience.

Viola Davis

In the 2014 article “Wrought in Rhimes’s Image” by Alessandra Stanley, the journalist wrote, “[Davis] doesn’t look at all like the typical star of a network drama.” She then went on to call her “less classically beautiful” than Kerry Washington, another leading lady of a Shonda Rhimes show. Davis responded on “The View,” saying “being a dark-skinned black woman, you hear it from the time you get out of the womb.” She also stated that “classically not beautiful” is a euphemism for being ugly, and that hearing it used to greatly affect her as a child. Classy and eloquent as always, Davis’ response was a poignant and empowering one, and was unsurprisingly praised by many.

Winona Ryder

Winona Ryder attributes her success to playing non-conventional characters. In an interview with, uh, Interview, Ryder says that her first five or six movie roles, including that of Rina in “Lucas,” were specifically written as being non-attractive in the scripts. And, calling herself “unusual looking,” she took to these roles that eventually granted her access to bigger and better things. Ryder also told a story of when she was 15 or 16 and a casting director stopped her mid-sentence to bluntly state that she wasn’t pretty enough for Hollywood and that she should go back to school. Ryder obviously didn’t heed her advice, and it led to a decades-long career in show business.

Lady Gaga

Gaga is quite the glamorous celebrity, so it’s a little weird to hear that people thought she wasn’t pretty enough to make it big. And to think, this was before she started wearing meat to work! An old friend of Gaga’s recently told People that Gaga faced an incredible uphill battle while trying to make it in the music biz. Not only was she not being taken seriously, but she was also being told, without subtlety or tact, that she wasn’t pretty enough to be a mainstream pop artist. She clearly channeled a lot of that frustration into her role as Ally in “A Star Is Born,” a role which has earned her heaps of praise.

Barbra Streisand

It’s no secret that Barbra Streisand has a prominent nose. It’s long-been one of her defining characteristics, and it’s been endlessly parodied and referenced in popular culture over the years. But the fact that she has attained a level of popularity worthy of parody speaks volumes. When Streisand was first starting out, she was often called “too Jewish-looking” and was relentlessly bullied for the size of her nose. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that she would never make it in showbiz because of it, but she refused to get plastic surgery. Her angelic voice and natural ability quickly shut the critics up, proving that talent can take you further than rhinoplasty any day.

Meryl Streep

Just imagine being the person who once criticized Meryl Streep! Back in the late ‘70s, Streep was looking to branch out of theater and into film. One of her first auditions was for the 1976 remake of “King Kong” – the one that time has largely forgotten. According to Streep, the producer turned to his son and asked him why he brought in such an ugly woman. Streep in turn scornfully apologized for not being “as beautiful as [she] should be.” Clearly, Streep wasn’t pretty enough for a “King Kong” remake, but she’s now arguably the most admired actress of all time, so really, who came out on top here?

Which star were you most surprised to find on this list? Tell us in the comments.