Man Up’s Lake Bell On Gender Inequality In Hollywood: “Women Are Up To The Challenge”
"I’m a little bit sad that ‘feminist’ is considered a bad word."
We all know Hollywood has a gender problem. This year, two of its biggest stars complained about being paid way, way, less than their male co-stars, while another told of being rejected for a role because — at 37 — she was “too old” to play the love interest of a man in his fifties. It’s even worse for women behind the camera — the tiny percentage of female directors has actually fallen over the last 17 years.
This makes the rise of writer, director and actor Lake Bell that much more notable. A regular on Boston Legal, Bell made her directing debut in 2013’s In A World, which she also scripted and starred in. That humorous foray into the male-dominated world of voiceover acting netted her a Sundance Screenwriting Award, and now Bell is back in British romantic comedy Man Up, starring opposite Simon Pegg as Nancy: a neurotic Brit in her mid-thirties who accidentally winds up on someone else’s blind date.
While Bell didn’t write or direct this one, she carries the film squarely on her shoulders — not least because her English accent is so spot-on you could be forgiven for thinking (as members of the film’s British crew did) you were listening to a bona fide Brit rather than a native New Yorker.
“On my actor’s bucket list, I always wanted to play a fully realised British character,” Bell told me at the film’s premier at the Tribeca Film Festival, back in April. She went to drama school in England. “A lot of my formative years were there, and I have a great affection for all the wonderful characters that make up that country.”
Directed by Ben Palmer (The Inbetweeners, Bo’ Selecta!), Man Up doesn’t stray far from the romantic comedy mould: girl meets boy, girl gets boy, girl loses boy, girl… well, you know how it goes. Bell describes Nancy as a “loveable trainwreck”: perpetually single while wishing she wasn’t; simultaneously resentful and dismissive of younger women who — unlike her — seem to have their shit somewhat together. “I am your future!” she yells at a couple of haughty twenty-somethings in a club bathroom.
“I am interested in the plight of smart women who are not so misanthropic that they can’t participate in society as normal, functioning humans, but who are sort of more grey,” Bell says. “They’re in that grey area of arrested development, or they’re hard on themselves, they judge themselves — that’s something that I relate to.”
This could just as easily apply to In A World’s Carol: a voice-over artist hovering around 30, floundering in an industry dominated by egotistical and territorial men (one of her competitors is her father, who is not above sabotaging her career to forward his own). It’s easy to see this characteras a takedown of Hollywood’s attitude to women.
“I think ladies have to work a bit harder, yes,” Bell tells me. “But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think women are up to the challenge. I think women are inherently resilient and powerful and multi-tasking masters.”
Strip away the funny accents and the dysfunctional family dynamics, and In A World is about women being no more or less talented and capable than men. Bell has never shied from professing her feminism. “I am a woman and therefore inherently feminist,” she once said in an interview. No doubt a lot of women would object to that. This is after all, the era of Women Against Feminism, a numbingly popular website in which young women list the reasons they “don’t need feminism.”
“Obviously a statement that comes from me can only come from me, it doesn’t mean that everybody has to get angry,” Bell clarifies, referring to the recent media trend of “outing” actresses as feminist or not feminist, to much (predictable) public outrage.
“I mean, I am a feminist and I made that statement, [but] it’s not with judgement to people who are uncomfortable with that word, because everyone is entitled to feel how they feel about it. And as a woman, I would never berate another woman for how she feels about her femininity, or her place in the world. But I can only speak to how I feel, and I’m a little bit sad that ‘feminist’ is considered a bad word.”
“I’m on the board of Women in Film,” she continues. “I know there’s some women in the film industry who won’t participate in that organisation because they think, ‘Well hey, I would like to be not a female director but just a director.’ … And I understand that [that’s what we’re striving for]. But for me, feminism is just community. It’s as simple as community.”
Man Up is far from a feminist polemic — but written by Tess Morris, it does, as Bell notes, feature a “strong kind of female character. And that’s ‘strong’ in the sense of well-written, complex, layered and exciting… and funny.” It’s just one of the many projects that was made possible following the success of In A World. “I was overwhelmed with excitement [at that time], but with the same breathe I was very cautious,” she says. “It’s a very delicate thing to have opportunity in a moment that’s very reactive.
“Off of one movie you get offered a lot of, ‘Oh, you can write, direct and star in a movie that we’ve had for x amount of years and we can’t fix.’ I’m not going to fix someone else’s problems or do a diluted version of what I just did,” she says. “You know, life’s short and it takes years to make a movie; [you have to work out] who you want to get with creatively. It’s like a marriage; who do you want to get married to?”
Bell’s creative career will next see her hitched to writer Noah Baumbach and producer Ron Howard on 911 drama The Emperor’s Children, where she will shift back into directing mode. While she’s had to deal with her (un)fair share of sexist attitudes (a journalist once told her she sounds “just like a real director”), Bell is clearly defying the odds. “I feel like I’m just a working actor,” she counters.
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Man Up is in cinemas now.
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