Tina Fey: 'What is my role in this business going to be when nobody wants to grab me by the p***y anymore?'

Actress used one of Donald Trump's most controversial quotes to contemplate the future of her career in a typically ageist industry

Thursday 08 December 2016 12:19 GMT

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Tina Fey makes speech ridiculing Donald Trump

Tina Fey promised herself she wouldn't enter Trump territory during an acceptance speech on Wednesday.

But the temptation proved too much and the comedian used her speech for the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award to highlight the absurdity of the election in one joke.

Fey was presented with the award at the Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment awards breakfast on Wednesday.

While touching on the limited opportunities for women in the industry when they reach a certain age, the 46-year-old used one of the most sexist, derogatory and lewd lines to come out of the election to illustrate her point.

“What is my role in this business going to be when nobody wants to grab me the p***y anymore?” she asked the audience.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

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The fact a blatant misogynistic remark bragging about groping women said 11 years ago by Donald Trump served no barrier to him being elected and a woman being defeated was not lost on Fey. The actress also used her speech at an awards ceremony which recognises female achievement to sarcastically exclaim: “WHAT AN AMAZING YEAR IT’S BEEN FOR WOMEN,” before letting out a long, sarcastic cackle and throwing her head down on the podium.

Mr Trump’s remarks, which he apologised for shortly after they were released while also simultaneously dismissing them as “locker room talk”, soon became a tag line in itself. Ardent Hillary Clinton supporter and outspoken feminist Lena Dunham even dressed up as a pussycat being groped on Halloween.

On a more serious note, Fey questioned how “can we proceed with dignity in this increasingly ugly, misogynistic time?” before jokingly suggesting she knows what lost Ms Clinton the presidency: Not enough celebrity endorsements.

“I promised I wouldn’t come up here and talk about the election because when I get written up in Breitbart I wanted it to be because I’m making an all-female Hitler biopic,” she continued. “But I have to say I think the real reason Hillary lost, and it’s a thing that people are afraid to talk about, is: Not enough celebrity music videos urging people to vote.”

Ms Clinton was aided by numerous celebrity endorsements during her campaign from Bruce Springsteen to Jay Z to Oprah Winfrey. Mr Trump meanwhile struggled to attract similar levels of high profile support.

The campaign was then fuelled by celebrities wading in to share their thoughts on one of the most divisive and toxic presidential races in recent memory.

Joss Whedon assembled a "sh*t-ton of famous people", including Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson, to remind Americans to vote while also denouncing Mr Trump,

Another one came in the form of 100 celebrities, including Kendall Jenner, Leonardo DiCaprio, Julia Roberts and Zendaya, who grouped together for a public service announcement asking people to consider the issues they care about and translating that into voting.

When Robert De Niro was asked to partake in an unbiased video to remind people to register to vote he could not help himself and instead turned it into a monologue where he announced he would like to punch Mr Trump in the face. He later retracted this after the election result.

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