"It felt very funny to speak very quietly, very funny not to fill a room with your voice. They would always say: 'You're going to be too big and too loud â and, by the way, you also put on 10lb [on camera],'" Bening said about the expectations of her at the time.
"When women have complexity, when women are difficult, our metric for being able to accept them is so different," she said. "It's like politicians: there's always this sense that they have to be likable. There's a quality that a woman has to have that's non-threatening and pleasing. Either that, or they have to be very conservative. Like [former British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher. We can accept a woman if she's very conservative, but the idea of a liberal woman is much scarier."
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