Barbie: The Bizarre Audition Choice Some Ken Actors Wish They Never Made
It's raining Kens, Hallelujah! We can imagine that or a similar sentiment running through the minds of casting directors Allison Jones and Lucy Bevan as they narrowed down their choices to play the various Kens in Greta Gerwig's "Barbie." But what they probably didn't expect was for some of the men auditioning for the roles to remove their shirts. "Those scenes were fun to audition," Bevan told MPA's The Credits. "Some of the Kens would take off their T-shirts, and we were like, no, no, you don't need to take off your T-shirt."
Jones and Bevan had already locked in Ryan Gosling as their primary Ken, but they needed an assortment of other Kens to flesh out the world of Barbieland. This included one Ken who would function as Gosling's primary antagonist — a role that eventually went to "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" star Simu Liu. To figure out who would take those various roles, actors were asked to audition with the film's now infamous "beach off" scene. Those who have seen "Barbie" know that it involves a lot of masculine aggression, which is why it's really no surprise that some actors tore off their own shirts while in the audition.
Most of the actors didn't even know what they were auditioning for
The auditioning process for "Barbie" was a complicated one. The production managed to keep the details of the movie out of the public eye; that's no small feat for a production of its size, but one that was necessary for the film's marketing campaign. The mystique of the project was a massive selling point, and the first trailer for "Barbie" showed only a brief montage of clips from the actual film, filling the bulk of its runtime with a parody of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" in which Margot Robbie's Barbie towered over a barren landscape of girls playing with other dolls.
As a result of that tight-lipped approach, Allison Jones and Lucy Bevan told The Credits that most actors who auditioned for "Barbie" went in unaware of what they were auditioning for. "We weren't allowed to send the script to anybody," Jones said. "So people did a lot of it on faith." But for the actors who sent in their self-tapes, they had a good reason to be excited about the opportunity. "Everybody wanted to work with [director] Greta [Gerwig], for good reason," Jones added.