Helen Mirren is coming in with a hot take.
While sitting down for The Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Actress Roundtable, the star, 79, got a chance to speak with Kathy Bates, Niecy Nash-Betts, Parker Posey, Keri Russell and Cristin Milioti about the ups and downs of the entertainment industry.
“I was told to have a nose job in my 20s,” Mirren told her fellow actors. “Someone said, ‘You’ll never get work if you don’t have a nose job.’ I said no. I didn’t want to be a pretty actress anyway. I elected to be not so pretty.”
Nash-Betts, 55, replied, “First of all, too late. Because you are. But I understand what you mean, in theory. I love being shiny in my real life. On camera, don’t care. I want to look like a dog. It doesn’t bother me to disappear in some of those roles.”
The “Claws” alum added, “I feel sorry for people who have been beautiful their whole life. Because when that’s what you’re known for, you got to keep it up for your whole life? I don’t know what I’d do.”
Bates, 76, who recently spoke out about how she once lost a starring role due to her looks, chimed in, “I don’t know if y’all have the same experience, but when you see an amazing performance, it doesn’t matter what that person looks like — they’re beautiful.”
But Mirren begged to differ, shockingly quipping, “Looking at our faces around this table, none of us are beautiful.”
“Oh, get out of town!” Bates fired back. “I feel more beautiful than I have in my entire life.”
Mirren, however, decided to double down.
“We’re not. None of us are beauties,” she pressed. “We all have really different faces, very interesting faces.”
Russell, 49, came to the English actress’s defense, telling the ladies, “I know what you mean. Like model beautiful?”
Mirren expressed, “We all know what ‘beautiful’ is like.”
Milioti, 39, reflected on her own experience with being a woman in Hollywood, sharing, “If I look back 10 years, I was often playing a version of ‘a girl of someone’s dreams.’
“That didn’t feel like my life experience, which is fine, but the older I get, the more I feel like I’m taking off a pair of tight pants. I feel so much freer. It’s not a dig at any of those projects,” she continued. “It’s how you’re perceived at 25. I was auditioning to play sorority girls or a dead body in a trunk or someone who was in love with a 40-year-old and being like, ‘Have you ever tried dancing in the rain?’ To leave that behind felt really good.”
On the flip side, Milioti said, “In the culture, there is such a celebration of men who really go for it.”
“They’ll do a crazy thing, and everyone’s like, ‘Wow, he must take this so seriously.’ I’ve witnessed some of that, mostly just heard about it, and have thought that if I ever did that, it would not end well. And that still happens.”
“Misogyny,” Posey, 56, simply stated. “When you asked that question, I felt myself kind of deflate because I think the misogyny is so rampant. To be a dynamic character or a dynamic woman or even a dynamic person, it’s kind of outrageous right now. There’s something very provincial that’s happened. I feel the need to be really entertaining and make people laugh.”
“Beautiful, but she doesn’t know it,” Mirren said about what was always written above character descriptions.
Bates has also seen that happen, recalling, “I made the mistake of asking the casting guy, ‘Why does everybody have to be beautiful?’ And he said, ‘If you want to go and make your own female version of ‘Marty,’ be my guest.’ So I left. I was asking an honest question. It still makes me pissed.”
“Marty” was a 1995 romance/drama that followed the life of bachelor Marty Piletti.
“This is something I can really believe in. It means something. Up until that point, things were starting to wind down for me. I was getting roles that I really cared about in films that no one would see. [There was] disappointment in the way things were edited,” Bates confessed. “It started to hurt too much. I just thought that maybe I ought to think about putting my house on the market and moving to France or something. I just wanted some real stimulation.”
Although Mirren might not consider herself beautiful, she doesn’t want to slow down anytime soon, telling the outlet, “I’m old. I didn’t die young, and the reason that I want to live as long as I possibly can — and continue working as long as I possibly can — is exactly what Keri said. It’s the adventure of it.”
Just last month, the “MobLand” vet shared her beauty advice with E! News, telling the outlet that aging is “nature, it’s what happens.”
“All I can say is,” she quipped, “don’t worry [about aging]. It’s cool.”
“My mother said the greatest thing to me: ‘Never be afraid of getting older,’” reminisced Mirren. “Of course, when you’re 18, middle age is like a foreign country. It’s so far away from you. But, you know, when you arrive in that country, you realize that country has great things. Maybe you like that country better than the country you left behind.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
