‘Tis the season for actor and actress roundtable discussions, always an awards-season staple. Personally, I love to read the transcripts from these discussions and I usually find the videos fascinating too, but my favorite roundtables are a thing of the past: where actors and actresses are put together and they’re forced to ask each other questions. I think only Newsweek does it like that at this point. The roundtable model has gotten pretty safe, is what I’m saying. The Hollywood Reporter’s “Actress roundtable” features Laura Dern (my nemesis), Lupita Nyong’o, Scarlett Johansson, Awkafina, Jennifer Lopez and Renee Zellweger. I appreciate that it’s racially diverse, although I am doubtful about Lupita’s chances for nominations for Us. Anyway, the reason why I rarely cover these pieces thoroughly is because there’s so much cross-talk and honestly, they’re rarely making news. You can read the full piece here. Here are some chunks of dialogue which I found interesting:

Jennifer Lopez on the stripping scene in Hustlers: “With Hustlers, this was the first time in a long time that I was actually terrified, really scared, to do that opening [pole dancing] number, which I suggested, of course. (Laughter.) It was my fault that I was there to begin with. It wasn’t written in the script. And I was like, no, she’s the big money-maker at the club — she has to show why. We can’t say it, we have to do it. I have to dance on the pole, I have to show them, I have to go there. Then when I was there and I had the dental floss on, I’m out there in a way I’ve never been. It was so scary, I was so terrified. I have my robe on and there’s 300 extras, all men. I think that was putting myself out there, in a way, deeper than I had ever done physically and emotionally, and playing a character that was that unapologetic in so many ways. It was so different from who I was.

Scarlett Johansson on taking roles to shift expectations: “The climate is so different now, there’s so many wonderful opportunities for women of every age to play all different types of people. When I was working in my early 20s and even my late teens, I felt that I got somehow typecast as hypersexualized, which I guess at the time seemed OK to everyone — it was another time — even though it wasn’t part of my own narrative. It was kind of crafted for me by probably a bunch of dudes in the industry. But it was really difficult for me to try to figure out how to get out of being an ingenue or the “other woman” because it was never anything that I had intended. I had to shake it up a little bit. I remember thinking at the time that maybe I needed a different job in this industry that would be more fulfilling, because it seemed like there was nowhere to go. And so I actually had the opportunity to do an Arthur Miller play on Broadway, and it totally reset my whole way of thinking about how I could work, and what different kinds of opportunities could be available to me.

Scarlett on the criticism of Marvel movies from Martin Scorsese: “There’s certainly a place for all kinds of cinema right now. People absorb content in so many different ways. I actually didn’t totally understand that statement, because I guess I needed some insight as to what it meant exactly. Because to me it seemed a little old-fashioned. But somebody pointed out to me that perhaps what the statement meant was that there’s no room for smaller films, because the cinema is taken up by these enormous blockbusters, and smaller movies don’t have a chance at the theater, which I hadn’t actually considered and think is a valid point. But I also feel like there’s sort of this shift in how people watch stuff and there’s all these platforms for different kinds of [content]. Now there’s movies and shows and art films and all kinds of stuff getting made that you can watch in all these different ways, and I just feel like it’s changing. It doesn’t mean it’s going away.

[From THR]

I think ScarJo is… um, right about Marty Scorsese? Yes, he possibly has a valid point, but on the other side, the streaming services are giving more chances to more artists to create art, which is the goal? Or it should be the goal. As for what Jennifer says about Hustlers… I mean, she was right, we did need to see her character strip. We needed that entrance. And as soon as the top of her feet bounced on the stage, I was like “Jennifer Lopez is winning an Oscar for this movie.”

THR Cover: The Drama Actress Roundtable with Jennifer Lopez (@JLo), Scarlett Johansson, @Lupita_Nyongo, Renée Zellweger, @LauraDern and @awkwafina https://t.co/hHIUJkqHir #THRRoundtable pic.twitter.com/gzSJ5qc4Vi

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) November 13, 2019

Cover & photo courtesy of THR