Aussie actress Radha Mitchell has opened up about the moment she was told by Hollywood heavyweights to remove a facial feature if she wanted to star in a Bruce Willis film.
During an appearance on The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show podcast this week, the 50-year-old revealed she felt pressured to remove a mole on her face before starring opposite the action star in the 2009 sci-fi thriller Surrogates.
The former Neighbours actress recalled wondering “how could they suggest such a thing”, saying she saw the request as “vandalism”.
“There was a screening in CAA [Creative Artists Agency]which is like this big agency and there was this huge screen and there was me and my mole,” Mitchell shared with Rowe.
“It had happened on the movie Man on Fire,” she continued, referencing her 2004 film with Denzel Washington. “They’re like, you have to remove your [mole]. I’m like, I don’t think so. So the mole stayed in that movie.”
However, the team behind Surrogates wanted it gone and when Mitchell opposed, they suggested a “compromise”.
“But in this one, there was much debate because I was going to play a robot and a robot would not have a mole. So there was like a lot of conversation,” she said. “My mum’s like, ‘Just cut it off.’
“So the compromise was, ‘OK you could shave it down, but leave the base of it there.’ And obviously it’s a mole. You can’t control what a mole is going to do, but that is what was done. I don’t know if the mole’s in the movie, I think they probably airbrushed us all because we were robots anyway.”
In the podcast, Mitchell – who currently stars in the Disney+ series Last Days of the Space Age – shares her other experiences in Hollywood, where she worked with big names including Vin Diesel.
“They were not Hollywood names [at the time]. They were just wannabes. We’d all just sort of entered Hollywood together. I shouldn’t say wannabes – they were people at the beginning of their career,” she said.
“And Vin Diesel was a personal trainer or something and he had done a few projects but he saw the movie as a vehicle and he was really clear about it. So there was a kind of machismo to kind of deal with just between all the men on that set. And I had to kind of adjust to that way of thinking. This sense of complete certainty, this ‘I am right’ and a kind of aggressive sense about it.”
After living and working in the US for decades, Mitchell recently returned to Australia to star in the Aussie production Last Days of the Space Age, which also stars fellow Neighbours alum Jesse Spencer.
“It’s bit more relaxed. I love that about the Australian perspective in general,” Mitchell told news.com.au earlier this month about being on an Aussie set.
“It’s very realistic. They don’t have inflated ideas about things. And it’s little less neurotic, maybe.”
