Female celebrities also face unsolicited weird advice regarding their looks and appearance.
Actress Monica Barbaro, popularly known for her role as Lt. Natasha “Phoenix” Trace in Top Gun: Maverick, had her own share of receiving weird advice.
She shared her experience of receiving such advice on set during Entertainment Weekly’s Breaking Big panel at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Savannah Film Festival.
One particular memory stood out, during her first commercial shoot, a makeup artist, asked her to trim her long lashes.
There’s just a lot of opinions and you just kind of have to filter through what works for you and not,” she said.
“I remembered this the other day, the weirdest advice I ever got was the very first commercial thing I ever shot. There was a woman doing my makeup, and she told me I had really long eyelashes, and I should probably trim them”.
She remembered her response vividly, “I didn’t take it like that. I mean, I was just like, ‘Oh, okay.'”
According to the actress, she felt it wasn’t right, “And then in my mind I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ And sometimes I just think it’s like when you hear advice that you’re just not sure of and you’re like, I don’t know, just trust that instinct. You could be told to do crazy s— like cut all your eyelashes off.”
Barbaro also talked about how little control actors have and many factors they can’t control.
She mentioned examples like being asked to go blonde for a role.
“They wanted you to be blonde or something, and that can play a role too. Or you might find out later that the producer actually wanted to hire their friend’s friend anyway, and I used to not really believe that. I thought it was all within my control”, Barbaro said.
“And it’s important to pay attention to what you can control, like your preparation and also your artistic vision and your connection with yourself.
“So important to have because it can be so impersonal. You have to know that you have to have familiarity with the artist that you want to be, but there’s so much about it that just also just has nothing to do with you,”she added.
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