The Nun's Bonnie Aarons Says 'I've Literally Been Told, 'Oh, No One Is Interested in Seeing You'

Bonnie Aarons isn’t just the star of Conjuring spinoff The Nun, which thanks! I’m just gonna stick with reading the Wikipedia page, if that’s OK. She’s also kind of a role model for anyone who knows what they want to do but lack the confidence to pursue it.

In a new profile published by The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Aarons tells associate editor Patrick Shanley that she had a hard time breaking into Hollywood on account of the way she looks—i.e., on account of the film industry’s deeply fucked-up understanding of what a “watchable” woman looks like:

“I can say I’ve had a difficult time. I’ve literally been told, ‘Oh, no one is interested in seeing you. No one wants to see somebody that looks like you on TV.’”

Love to live at the mercy of seven or eight men’s boners.

Aarons says she got her big break thanks to a chance run-in with a director at a Studio City bar where a lot of “bigwigs” were known to hang out:

“So, I went and I’m sitting at the bar and there’s a lot of bigwigs there. They’re playing this bar game where someone writes a question on a piece of paper, they hand it to another person and that person says an answer without revealing the question… The question was, ‘What would you say to me if I told you that you have a beautiful pussy?’ So, I said, ‘Well, you haven’t even seen my cat.’ Everybody fell off their seats.”

Turns out one of those men was director Garry Marshall, who talked to Aarons after the game was over. She asked him to put her in one of his movies, and… he did! She played the role of “The Prostitute” in 1992’s Exit to Eden.

Although she acknowledges that everyone has “a different way of getting somewhere and it’s not the same formula for everyone,” Aarons leaves Hollywood hopefuls and plebe readers alike with some words of encouragement:

“You keep going, no matter what. No matter how many people told me I was too ugly, I still went after it… To have a passion for something, you’ll find a way.”