You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. It's one of the first things Greta mentioned to me even before I read the script. She said, "I wrote this monologue for Gloria, and I've always imagined you saying this." While that was flattering, it also felt like pressure in the nicest way. I read the monologue and it hit me as powerful and meaningful. It also felt like, wow, what a gift as an actor to get to deliver something that feels so cathartic and truthful. But it also felt like this pivotal moment that I obviously didn't want to mess up. There was a little bit of healthy pressure around it. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.

During her performance, Gerwig tells The Atlantic, "When America was giving her beautiful speech, I was just sobbing, and then I looked around, and I realized everybody’s crying on the set. The men are crying too, because they have their own speech they feel they can’t ever give, you know? And they have their twin tightrope, which is also painful." Read Gloria's full monologue from Barbie (2023): The past decade has been another complicated one for the colour. Millennials even had their own shade of pink – but this watered-down hue was an almost apologetic version. "The kind of pinks that have done really well in the past few years and transcended girliness have been yellow and grey-based pinks, instead of the blue-based pinks, like Barbie pink and Legally Blonde pink," says St Clair. One of the scenes I loved filming and I love in the movie was one that Greta and I worked on, which was the scene in the Barbie convertible with the mother/daughter. That moment where Gloria's given up and it's Sasha who tells her that she has to fight for the thing that she believes in. We did spend a lot of time tweaking that scene to get to the place of, what is this for Gloria? In this moment, what is it that she's here for? What does she need to get from this journey?You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

One of the highlights of Greta Gerwig's Barbie comes in the second half of the film, when Gloria (America Ferrera) delivers a monologue on the impossible double standards of being a woman. So, as Barbie makes the colour inescapable once again, what does it represent now? Director Greta Gerwig said she wanted to make "something anarchic and wild and completely bananas", and says "it most certainly is a feminist film... in a way that includes everyone." (Although Mattel themselves beg to differ). Actor America Ferrera was drawn to the film because it confronts Barbie's role in "shaping expectations for women" and her character Gloria – assistant to Mattel's CEO and mother of a teenage daughter – delivers a pivotal monologue that Margot Robbie says "captures the cognitive dissonance of being a woman under the patriarchy". If all this showed how powerful pink could be, some harnessed that power to their advantage. Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi embraced pink suits – a way to subtly wield authority while also reassuring that they weren't a threat. This idea was explored in popular culture, too. In Legally Blonde, the pink-obsessed Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon) is dismissed as a dumb blonde – but lands a place at Harvard Law School ( "What, like it's hard?") and graduates top of her class.I have my own prep and process as an actor on any day to drop in and be in an open place where I'm exploring and having fun. I think that part of it was — this was also based on Greta's direction — neither one of us went into it feeling like it's got to grow and crescendo to this big moment where you burst into tears or you're laughing so hard you cry. There were no targets to hit. It was much more a moment-to-moment drop in. Truly, every take was very different. There were takes that leaned into anger. There were takes that leaned into laughter. It really did, over the course of filming, find a shape. It was about just staying as present in the moment and just seeing really where the words would take it. It wasn't always the way. As Kassia St Clair, a cultural historian and author of The Secret Lives of Colour, notes, the girl-pink/boy-blue divide didn't set in until the mid-20th Century. An 1893 article on baby clothes in The New York Times stated that you should "always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl." Pink was seen as the stronger colour – a relative of the passionate, aggressive red, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. "My father was born in 1925, he's a military man and yet pink is his favourite colour and he doesn't see anything peculiar about that," St Clair tells BBC Culture. "But for me, growing up as a child of the 80s and 90s, of course, pink was very much a feminine colour, and I had it shoved down my throat. So for a long time, I completely avoided pink. I was fed up with it. I had a very complicated relationship with it." In the film, too, pink is for everyone – including Ken. And although one movie – or one world-famous footballer wearing pink – is unlikely to singlehandedly change our perception of pink as a gendered colour, our fraught relationship with it might be shifting. "Shorthands and clichés are very powerful and it's difficult to escape them," says St Clair. "I think what is changing is there's a loosening of the idea that pink is a limiting colour and that pink means something lesser than blue. There's a power and a knowingness with the way that pink is used now. It's coming with a wink." Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. It took them two days to shoot the scene, and Ferrera says she probably did "30 to 50 full runs of it, top to bottom." Her favorite line, she says, is the "always be grateful" line, which she worked on together with Gerwig.