Sometimes actors are asked to do uncomfortable things for auditions, as evidenced the other day by Alison Brie's reveal that she'd been asked to wear a bikini to an Entourage audition. But apparently it's not uncommon for actresses in Hollywood to be asked to put on bikinis, as Emmy Rossum recently said that she got asked to do a movie in the past year, but it came with a caveat. She didn't even need to audition for the role, but the director wanted to see her in a bikini first. The Shameless actress said:
Even as recently as a year ago, my agent called me and was like, 'I'm so embarrassed to make this call, but there's a big movie and they're going to offer it to you. They really love your work on the show. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There's no audition. That's all you have to do.'
Rossum's pretty frank with her comments as part of a round table interview over at THR, but what's so striking about this whole thing is that the director even told her agent he'd seen her work. He clearly thought she was the right fit for the part, and even after telling her agent that, he decided he still wanted to make sure her body would look exceptional on camera. Maybe you are wondering if the role in the movie was for something like Baywatch, where beach scenes and being fit were actually a key part of the gig. But Rossum explained about that, too, noting it wasn't for that sort of reason, at all.
Emmy Rossum even clarified that she is nude sometimes on Shameless, so if the director really needed to know what she looked like, he'd have a pretty good idea. However, the real goal of the bikini was to see whether or not she had gotten "fat."
He wanted to know if I was fat now. That was basically the question. And I actually had this moment like, 'Well, how good is the part?' For a second, I was like, 'Would I do it? Send me the script. Maybe the character is in a bikini in the movie.' Not in a bikini in the movie.
While Emmy Rossum doesn't expressly tell us which movie and which director wanted to make sure she hadn't put on too much weight, from the sounds of things, she seemingly opted just to pass on the role, also noting that the director knowing how "tight [her] ass is" really had nothing to do with the gig. It's common for actors to have to do weird things as part of movie auditions. Kelly Rohrbach even went out of the way to wear a bikini for her Baywatch audition, but in that case, that was her choice. Asking someone to disrobe so they can make sure they haven't gotten too fat is a whole 'nother level of insulting. Let's hope Rossum, or anyone really, doesn't have to deal with that sort of thing with directors in the future.
