‘The Act’ Star Joey King Reveals She Was Recently Told That She Wasn’t ‘Pretty Enough’ For A Role

Joey King may have nailed her role as Gypsy Rose Blanchard in Hulu’s The Act, but the 19-year-old says that it hasn’t always been an easy road for her as an actress.

As fans know, King had the tall order of impersonating Gypsy Rose, whose mother Dee Dee Blanchard tortured her for years by making her think she was sick with illnesses like leukemia, asthma, muscular dystrophy, and brain damage. It was later revealed that Dee Dee had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. After years of torment, Gypsy couldn’t take it anyone and she and her boyfriend murdered her mother.

So far, King has already generated Emmy buzz for her role in the series, but she says that some of her past auditions for roles didn’t come as easy. Recently, she told Refinery 29 that she had been turned down for a number of roles, and she didn’t always get the feedback that she was hoping she would hear.

“You start to get discouraging feedback, the stuff that you don’t want to hear. I got that I’m not pretty enough, pretty recently actually. That’s just really f***ed up.”

Though the negative feedback didn’t make her cry, the actress says that it still really hurt to hear those things being said about her. After that, she just kept going on auditions because she knew that some of the other Hollywood big wigs had unrealistic expectations for her.

“I don’t want to work for the person that thinks I’m not pretty enough. I have no desire to work for them, ever,” she says.

At first, Joey says that she was hesitant at playing the role of Gypsy, mostly because she wasn’t sure if she wanted to shave her head again. But after thinking about it for a bit, she came to the conclusion that she would stop at nothing to land the role and decided to move forward with shaving her head. This marks the third time the 19-year-old has buzzed her hair for a role with the first two coming in A Dark Knight Rises and Wish I Was Here.

And as The Inquisitr recently shared, shaving her head was not the only thing that she found daunting about her role in the series. King recently shared that it took a lot of work to master Gypsy’s voice. The actress says that she would listen to tapes of the real-life Gypsy Rose for hours and hours and oftentimes, she would fall asleep with her headphones in because she wanted to make sure that she nailed Blanchard’s high-pitched voice.

The first two episodes of The Act are currently streaming on Hulu.