SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Barbie,” now playing in theaters nationwide.
America Ferrera’s epic “Barbie” monologue left the entire set in tears, Greta Gerwig recalled in a new interview with The Atlantic. Even the male cast members were left emotional, which the director reasoned was because they have their own speech to make.
“When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around and I realized everybody’s crying on the set,” Gerwig said. “The men are crying, too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful. There’s something about some of these structures that are just, you know, ‘Somebody make me stop!’ That’s sort of, I suppose, the feeling behind Ken.”
Ferrera previously revealed to Vanity Fair that it took two full days to film the monologue, in which her character Gloria, a Mattel employee, inspires Barbie to get back on her feet by railing against the many double standards women face on a daily basis.
“It was probably 30 to 50 full runs of it, top to bottom,” Ferrera said about filming the monologue. “By the end, [co-star Ariana Greenblatt] recited the monologue to me because she had memorized it because that’s how many times I had said it.”
“Neither one of us went into it feeling like it’s got to grow and crescendo to this big moment where you burst into tears or you’re laughing so hard you cry,” Ferrera added. “There were no targets to hit. It was much more a moment-to-moment drop in. Truly, every take was very different. There were takes that leaned into anger. There were takes that leaned into laughter. It really did, over the course of filming, find a shape. It was about just staying as present in the moment and just seeing really where the words would take it.”
In her interview with The Atlantic, Gerwig also touched upon the film’s ending. After Ken introduces Barbie Land to the patriarchy, Ferrera’s character and Margot Robbie’s Barbie team up to rally the rest of the Barbies to fight back. The film ends with Barbieland in somewhat of a hybrid state between Ken’s patriarchy and Barbie’s feminist utopia.
“We’re all still figuring things out — that’s part of it,” Gerwig said. “But the only thing I could ever give anyone is that they’re all still in the mess. Maybe it’s a little better for the Kens. You don’t want to tell people how to watch things, but at the end of the movie, the production design incorporates some of Ken’s fascinations into Barbie Land. Like, the perfection is not as beautiful as the thing that started blending everything together. I remember when we went to shoot the finale, when we all walked on set, we were like, This is the most beautiful it’s ever been.”
“Barbie” is now playing in theaters nationwide from Warner Bros.
