Emily Ratajkowski Quit Acting Because She Was Treated “Like A Piece Of Meat” and Couldn’t Land “Serious” Roles

Emily Ratajkowski has forged a new path for herself in media and fashion, making it easy to forget her brief stint in acting in the 2010s. But a new profile of the supermodel details why she effectively quit acting after her short-lived career.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Ratajkowski said she fired her acting agent, manager, and commercial representative in 2020 after she grew tired of trying to make herself more “digestible to powerful men in Hollywood” in order to land better roles.

“I didn’t trust them,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can handle receiving phone calls. I’m gonna make these decisions. None of you have my best interest at heart. And you all hate women.’”

Her first major role was in Gone Girl playing Ben Affleck’s much younger mistress. But she struggled to land other roles after that showed she was a “serious actress with longevity.” She had some success, appearing in movies like I Feel Pretty and starring opposite Aaron Paul in Welcome Home, but it did not pan out. Her last audition was reportedly for the late Charlbi Dean’s role in Triangle of Sadness.

“I didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, I’m an artist performing and this is my outlet.’ I felt like a piece of meat who people were judging, saying, ‘Does she have anything else other than her [breasts]?’” she said.

Ratajkowski’s only acting credit since 2019 is a single episode of History of the World: Part II. She has since pivoted to media, publishing a New York Times bestselling book of essays and launching a podcast series outside of her regular modeling.

The supermodel has openly spoken about her increasingly disillusioned feelings for Hollywood. As the profile notes, one of the essays in her book My Body talks about going to a WME party with her then-husband and Uncut Gems producer Sebastian Bear-McClard. While there, his agent told Ratajkowski that she was “like Pamela Anderson before the hep C.”

“I thought about the way that [Bear-McClard] had glided through the room, a room full of men who only two years before had been kissing Harvey Weinstein’s ring and encouraging their young female clients to take meetings with him in hotel rooms,” she wrote in the essay. “I hated that my husband was at all connected to these men.”

Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard are currently in the midst of a divorce and custody battle for their two-year-old son after four years of marriage.

Though she did not comment on it in the profile, a recent report from Variety details multiple workplace sexual misconduct allegations against Bear-McClard from three women, one of whom was just 17 when she was hired by him to appear nude in a film.

According to Variety, Ratajkowski did not comment on the report, but “friends say she is not surprised by the allegations.”

“Obviously, it would be nice to be with somebody who’s in the industry or understands it, but I don’t think I can. That was what that essay was about,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I had a hard time even being at a party like that. But then having a part of me that was so connected to it was even harder.”