People often say Hollywood doesn’t have a heritage of strong female protagonists. I disagree—we do. It’s just that in conventional male storytelling, when a female protagonist is determined or unorthodox, she typically finds herself coming to an unhappy end. A perfect example of this “femme fatale” is Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8. Her character, sexually free Gloria Wandrous, is the kind of antiheroine any actress would like to play in 2018. But when the film was released, nearly 60 years ago, Gloria was killed off for being that way.
My writing partner, the director Anthony Byrne, is very aware of this history in film noir. Anthony is a feminist. He believes in equality, and his short films (like the award-winning Short Order) have always been female-centric. Our new thriller, In Darkness, in which I play a blind pianist who overhears her neighbor’s murder, was born from our mutual frustration with the landscape of female characters in this genre.
While In Darkness may look like part of a recent wave of feminist films, this moment in entertainment took almost a decade to build. After Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in 2010, women in Hollywood were kind of looking to our left and our right and saying, “This is happening.” In so many press junkets for The Hunger Games, in which I played the tattooed rebel Cressida, my castmates and I discussed the importance of female protagonists who are imperfect, who are neither angel nor whore.
In the time since Anthony and I started writing this project, nine years ago, the landscape has changed so much. I know it’s happening more slowly than any of us would like, but it is happening. And I think women should celebrate what we are achieving right now without forgetting to embrace our feminist, equalist men. Because they are there. It is bizarre to think we can solve issues of gender inequality without half of society’s participants. Men must be viewed as part of the solution for lasting, effective change.
We all have the right to speak up, but we also have to listen. We’re all terrified, and we have good reason to be. The world is a terrifying place right now. But what our foresisters fought for was choice. Do I want to be a high-powered CEO? Do I want to be a mother with five kids? No one choice is more feminist than the other. The feminism is in the choice. So I choose to focus on working with men who want to change the way stories about unorthodox and complex women end.
Natalie Dormer has starred in The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. Her latest film, In Darkness, is in theaters May 25.