Anna Camp and Erin Darke of "Good Girls Revolt" on the role they never want to play again
The lead actors of “Good Girls Revolt” say they haven’t experienced the same level of sexism as their fictional News of the Week counterparts on the new Amazon show, but co-stars Anna Camp and Erin Darke told CBS News there’s one sexist trope they never want to play into again.
“Hooker with a heart of gold,” Darke said immediately.
“Hooker,” said Camp.
Darke joked, “I only play hookers with a heart of gold. I think because I have a round face -- they think it’s funny to cast me as a hooker who’s really a good person inside.”
“I played a hooker on ‘Numb3rs,’” said Camp, making co-stars Darke and Genevieve Angelson laugh.
Though she can laugh about it now, Camp said the gig left her with a bad taste in her mouth.
“They had a shot in an elevator -- this is the beginning of the show, when they find out what the crime was -- and I had to be groped in the elevator,” she explained.
“It wasn’t like we were on a set. We were on a closed elevator. What made me think that was going to be OK? That I was going to be able to walk off that show feeling good about myself? If you’re a good actor, these things resonate with you, and I ended up taking a little bit of that home with me. It inspired me to say, ‘I’m never going to do this again.’”
On “Good Girls Revolt,” the female characters -- who work as researchers at a news magazine in the late 1960s -- find themselves working very hard when only their male counterparts have bylines, leading them to eventually file a lawsuit for gender equality in the workplace.
Darke said that though she has never felt a man has gotten credit for her work, it is frustrating when she finds that the most interesting roles are for men.
“You read this amazing script with all these real, cool, well-developed male roles, and then you read the role you’re going for, and it’s a girl who comes in and says four lines and is in the background a lot of the time,” she said. “It’s not like the guys are taking the credit, but it does feel like you’re in the background a bit.”
“Good Girls Revolt,” which begins in 1969, is based on the landmark gender bias case against Newsweek. It premieres Friday on Amazon Prime.