“I felt so ashamed”: how unemployment and impostor syndrome made Camila Morrone’s career
When your stepfather is Al Pacino, and your ex-boyfriend is Leonardo DiCaprio, you’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill, and that’s the situation facing Camila Morrone.
Her mother dated the Oscar winner for ten years, and she remains on good terms with him, and as for Leo, Camila dated him between 2017 and 2022. While she hasn’t quite reached Pacino or DiCaprio levels of success yet, she’s well on her way, having starred in the acclaimed indie drama Mickey and the Bear and recently appeared as photographer Camila Alvarez in the Amazon Prime series Daisy Jones & the Six, the latter of which earned her an Emmy nomination.
Despite the obvious connection to Hollywood (and the fact that her mother is an actor in her own right), an acting career wasn’t always on the cards, as Morrone initially wanted to be a model, working for brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Calvin Harris, and once appearing on the cover of the Turkish version of Vogue magazine before she made her big screen debut at the age of 16 in the film Bukowski, finally committing to the business full-time in 2018.
While not directly linked, there has been a healthy relationship between modelling and acting for decades, as success on the catwalk can definitely open doors in Hollywood, especially if you talk to the right people. Morrone initially didn’t want to exploit this connection, however, as she explained to the Los Angeles Times.
“I felt so ashamed of my modelling history when I first got into acting,” she revealed, “I tried to hide that part of my life, because I didn’t want to be looked at as too sexy for a role. I’ve heard, ‘Oh, she’s not homey-looking’, or ‘too voluptuous’, or, I don’t want to say sexy, because then I sound like I think of myself that way, which I don’t, but that’s oftentimes it.”
The ‘too sexy’ debate is nothing new, as plenty of actors have lost out on roles because producers or directors felt they didn’t look ‘real’ enough.
We’re currently experiencing that with Sydney Sweeney and Kim Novak, with the latter claiming that the former is the “totally wrong” choice to play her. This speaks to a larger issue with Hollywood and its reliance on very specific standards of beauty. So-called ‘normal-looking’ people can’t seem to get a foot in the door, while the industry keeps complaining that actors are all ‘too beautiful’.
While the likes of Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer give models-turned-actors a bad name, there have been plenty more examples of people making it work. Halle Berry was a Miss USA and Miss World competitor before one performance changed her career forever, and Chloë Sevigny stumbled into acting when doing a favour for a friend. Just because acting isn’t somebody’s passion from day one, it doesn’t mean they can’t be good at it.
Morrone is still very early in her acting career, so the jury is still out on which camp she joins. As it stands, however, it’s looking like she won’t be bringing the profession into disrepute.
