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Chloë Grace Moretz Recalls ‘Pushback’ from ‘Older Men’ Infantilizing Her on Set

Chloë Grace Moretz has been acting for almost 20 years, and the former child star is speaking out about “pushback” on sets.

The “Kick-Ass” alum detailed the “power struggle” she felt leading films as a teen amongst older male colleagues. “Having to even advocate to an older man on behalf of your 14, 15, 16-year-old self is a really, really crazy kind of mind fuck,” Moretz said during the “Reign with Josh Smith” podcast (via The Independent).

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She continued, “It was always odd from my first leading role when I was 14 in ‘Carrie’…It was always really interesting to see who would be really unhappy with a young woman.”

Mortez started her career at age 7, appearing in films like “Amityville Horror” and TV shows such as “Desperate Housewives” and “My Name Is Earl.”

“At that point, I had already worked for so many years — almost 10 years — and as I continued through having more important roles on set as I grew up, it was always very interesting to see the pushback that I would get from a lot of people,” Moretz said. “The majority of it was older men for sure who would infantilize me. If I had real things to bring to the table, a lot of the time it would get shot down.”

Moretz previously admitted that “everything shifted” in her career following the success of “Kick-Ass” in 2010. “The first time I experienced paparazzi, it was 10 to 15 adult guys surrounding a 12-year-old girl,” she told Hunger magazine. “It’s an assault on all the senses, with screaming and flashes. I got into the car afterwards and I just burst into tears. I think that’s my marker of before and after.”

The “Peripheral” star shared with IndieWire in 2018 that she felt compelled to pause her career after realizing that she was “super unhappy with the projects I was putting out.”

“I had a really rough time with the studio system and trying to get questions answered. I was confronted with these aggressively large hurdles and I was like — ‘I’m tired of trying to hurdle a system which is set up for me to fail,'” Moretz said, adding that even her agents thought signing on for gay conversion therapy drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” would make Moretz lose her career.

“I was up in the $100 million studio system, and crashed back down to a barely $1 million movie,” she recalled. “With this amazing script and a character that a lot of people would have shied away from.”

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