Chloë Grace Moretz has been working in the business for more than half of her life, but it hasn’t always been easy to get respect on her film sets — even as the star.
She started her film career at just seven years old when she filmed “The Amityville Horror.” Seven years later, at 14, she had her first starring role in the 2013 remake of Stephen King’s “Carrie.”
“A big part of being the lead in a show or a movie is you kind of set the tone for the set,” Moretz said on the latest “Reign with Joseph Smith.” Only it turned out not to be that easy for “The Peripheral” star.
She said that even as she grew as a seasoned actor and took no bigger roles and eventually lead roles, “it was always very interesting to see the pushback that I would get from a lot of people.”
In particular, she said that she found that most of that pushback came from one particular demographic. “The majority of it was older men, for sure, who would infantilize me,” she said.
She said that she often found herself in a “really wild power struggle and power dynamic of a young girl who had worked for already [over a decade] and was the lead of the movies but was still a kid in every sense of the word.”
“If I had real things to bring to the table, a lot of the time it would get shot down,” the actress continued. “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 mind f—.”
“It was always really interesting to see who would be really unhappy with a young woman,” she said, referring to her position as the lead in films from such a young age.
Moretz said that what happened was that she adapted and learned how to advocate for herself through a kind of subterfuge. “It kind of taught me how to propose questions in a way to make the ideas their ideas,” she explained.
As she got older and even more seasoned in her craft, though, she said she finally “got to that f— it time.” It was through this process that she learned about boundaries, which she says is about “speaking your truth without blame or judgement to people.”
These days, the 25 year old is in full control of her career and currently starring in Amazon Prime’s “The Peripheral,” which wraps its first season this Friday.
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