Lena Dunham. Tracee Ellis Ross. Amy Schumer. Gina Rodriguez. Kate McKinnon. Ellie Kemper. The Hollywood Reporter assembled a TV Justice League of wonderful comedy geniuses for their latest roundtable and NOTHING was off limits in a wide-ranging (and glorious) conversation about vagina patches, sexism, the lack of women in late night TV, racism and more.
The stars of Girls, black-ish, Inside Amy Schumer, Jane the Virgin, Saturday Night Live and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt could not be more different, yet they've all faced very similar challenges in Hollywood. Except when it comes to nudity.
"I stopped wearing the nude patch after the first season of Girls. There's not one guy who works on that show who hasn't seen the inside of my vagina," Dunham said.
But what's the patch? That's what Ross wanted to know. "This patch — you glue it over your vagina. It gets sweaty and always falls off. My male costars, at the end of the day, don't care," Dunham explained. Her male costars? They're wearing penis bags.
And here's where things differed a bit. "I've never done a sex scene. I am so prudish that when I've had to kiss someone in a scene, I think for the next hour that we're in love! It's a middle- school frame of mind," Kemper said.
Did you know some people in Hollywood still have a problem with women in charge? And accepting women can be funny and are a lot of times funnier then men? Ugh. Yes, it's still an issue.
"I heard a guy on my show say into his microphone: ‘I hate this job. I can't wait to be back on a show where there's a man at the helm,'" Dunham said.
"I hope you sent Colin Quinn home for that," Schumer joked.
"Colin is actually the world's biggest feminist! Later, that same guy came up to me at lunch and said, ‘You're really enjoying that buffet, aren't you?'" Dunham said.
Everybody with us now: Whuck?! Dunham said he's "the worst person alive."
But Ross said racism trumps everything because it "happens behind the scenes."
"Being on a show run by a woman with four women leads gives you a template that when you walk out into the world, you don't see it. It changed my expectations," Ross said.
While many of the ladies at the table have dealt with sexism in Hollywood, not all have had to deal with racism. When asked about the lack of film roles for black women, Ross said she goes for roles that aren't necessarily listed as desiring black women. Rodriguez, whose inspirational speech after winning the Golden Globe for Jane the Virgin created tons of headlines, said she removes herself "instantly if something's perpetuating a stereotype."
"But the only way to stop stereotypes is to say, ‘I'm going to wait for a journey that suits me,'" she said. "When you compromise, you don't do your best work."
Schumer, whose Comedy Central series is now in its third season, said auditioning actors for her series was an eye-opening experience.
"I never thought how bad it could be for you guys until I had a TV show and we had to do auditions," Schumer told Rodriguez and Ross. "Many black women who auditioned thought that we wanted them to be ‘sassy.'… We're like, ‘No, just be yourself.' I thought: That sucks. It meant they'd been in a lot of rooms where they were like, ‘Uh, can you be more like [snaps her finger].'"
Head over to The Hollywood Reporter for much more.