Brie Larson Calls Out 2 Sexist Female Roles That She’ll Never Do

Brie Larson wants screenwriters to do better.

On Sunday, The Hollywood Reporterpublished a roundtable discussion between Larson, Jennifer Aniston, Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, Sofía Vergara, Naomi Watts and Anna Sawai for its “Off Script” series, in which the dramatic actors spoke frankly about their careers.

Nearly 24 minutes into the discussion, THR executive editor, Lacy Rose, asked the women if there was any “role, or perhaps …triggering terms in character descriptions [in scripts] that make you all say, ‘Mm, no I’m not going to do this?’”

Larson had an immediate, knee-jerk reaction to the question.

“Broken, but beautiful or ‘beautiful, but she doesn’t know it,’” Larson said while lowering her head in mock-exhaustion.

“That one came so easily to you!” Rose remarked.

“I’ve read that so many times,” the “Lessons in Chemistry” star said. “I read that last week, probably.”

“‘Beautifull, but doesn’t know it,’” Larson repeated sarcastically. “But you’re telling me …it’s in the script.”

Later in the discussion, Foster pointed out that the “beautiful, but broken” description isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.

“I don’t know that this is as true now as it was for most of my career, but I was always just shocked and amazed that so many of the scripts that I read, the entire motivation for the female character was that she had been traumatized by rape,” Foster said. “That it seemed to be the only motivation that male screenwriters could come up with for why women did things. … Rape or molestation seemed to be the one lurid, big, emotional backstory that they could understand in women.”

Larson and Foster aren’t the only people in the entertainment industry who have noticed these descriptions for female characters and find