CNN
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America Ferrera, who was honored with the SeeHer Award at Sunday’s Critics Choice Awards, used her speech to encourage others.
Ferrera starred as Gloria in “Barbie.” Her character delivered a memorable film monologue in regards to the challenges of being a girl, and he or she was launched by her “Barbie” co-star Margot Robbie.
Ferrera started by thanking the Critics Alternative Affiliation.
“Really, your voices form how folks take into consideration and worth the tales we inform. I’m deeply grateful to you for this acknowledgment and this honor,” she mentioned. “Receiving the SeeHer Award for my contributions to extra genuine portrayals of ladies and ladies — might it’s extra significant to me? As a result of I grew up as a first-generation Honduran American lady in love with TV, movie and theater, who desperately needed to be part of a storytelling legacy that I couldn’t see myself mirrored in.”
Ferrera mentioned she would usually see herself “in characters who had been sturdy and complicated. However these characters hardly ever, if ever, appeared like me. I yearned to see folks like myself onscreen as full people.”
“After I began working over 20 years in the past — that appears unimaginable, I do know — but it surely appeared unimaginable that anybody might make a profession portraying totally dimensional Latina characters however due to writers, administrators, producers and executives who’re daring sufficient to rewrite outdated tales and to problem deeply entrenched biases, I, and a few of my beloved Latina colleagues, have been supremely blessed to convey to life some fierce and incredible ladies,” Ferrera, who rose to fame in her starring roles in “Ugly Betty” and “The Sisterhood of the Touring Pants,” mentioned.
Ferrera mentioned she sees development with the work of actors like Ariana Greenblatt, who portrayed her daughter in “Barbie,” Jenna Ortega and Selena Gomez, who’ve come after her.
“To me, that is the most effective and highest use of storytelling to affirm each other’s full humanity, to uphold the reality that we’re all worthy of being seen — Black, brown, indigenous Asian, trans, disabled, any physique kind, any gender,” Ferrera mentioned. “We’re all worthy of getting our lives richly and authentically reflective.”
She additionally thanked others, together with Robbie and “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig and the movie’s “Kens.”
“Thanks to our Kens — Noah Baumbach, Tom Ackerley, David Heyman and Ryan Gosling — for all being man sufficient to assist ladies’s work,” Ferrera mentioned. “You might be all good and you’re greater than ‘Kenough.’”