“In Black Gold, what was I? Like a princess who had no say, who was just in love … I can’t even remember the story, that’s how bad it is.” And she is really trying hard to remember her character now. Now we are on to Black Gold, a historical epic about the scramble for oil in the Arabian desert in the 1920s. I wish I’d been more confident in putting my case forward back then, but I remember asking him what his reference was and I was told Megan Fox from Transformers and I was like – that is a completely different film.” Again, she doesn’t write off the experience – she got to work with some of her favourite actors, including Andy Serkis and John Lithgow – but she does write off her role in the film. I spoke to one of the producers and asked why I was put in high heels because it didn’t make sense for my character – if she was so hands-on with animals, she needed freedom of movement and her body language needed to be different. Have you seen Jane Goodall wearing high heels and running on the Golden Gate Bridge? I don’t think so. “I felt completely undermined as the only female perfomer in the film who wasn’t given a task other than to be a primatologist in frickin’ high heels and follow the men around. Pinto was looking forward to playing a smart, independent-minded primatologist. ![]() Then it is on to another unhappy experience, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, made in 2011. ‘The most beautiful girl in the world’ … Pinto in Slumdog Millionaire. I’m 34 years old, I’ve worked for 11 years in this industry, I’m not desperate and I will never be desperate.” I’m just going to stick to what my gut instinct tells me. I wouldn’t work with him because I’m in solidarity with women who have come out with their stories, whether they are proven or not. ![]() “I was just the muse, the ingenue.” Would she work again with Allen, who has been accused by his daughter Dylan of sexual assault (an allegation he denies)? “No. She loved working with Brolin on the Allen film (“Josh taught me to relax because I would get really worked up before each take – I was too nervous to breathe and my body would stiffen”), but has nothing positive to say of her part. Pinto takes me through some of her experiences, with jaw-dropping honesty. Does she see a contradiction between her feminism and the films she has made? “Completely! There was no way I agreed with so much that I did in my early career.” Meanwhile, off-screen she has been an assertive force for good, consistently campaigning for the rights of women. ![]() It has been a strange, decade-long career, including an unexplained extended break. “And that’s their problem, not mine, right, because I know what I can bring to the table as talent.” “They couldn’t go past what they saw on the outside,” Pinto says. When he confesses this to her, she says: “I’ve always wanted to be someone’s muse.” In Terence Mallick’s Knight of Cups, she is a pouting femme fatale who states: “I don’t want to wreak havoc in men’s lives any more.” In Miral, directed by Julian Schnabel, she plays a Palestinian heroine whose boyfriend tells her she has “beautiful eyes”, while an Israeli interrogator tells her: “You have a beautiful face … you won’t recognise it when you get out of here.” Some of the world’s best-known directors have been so fixated on her looks that they forgot to create a character for her. So in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Josh Brolin’s author, Roy, spends his time staring longingly out of the window at Pinto’s Dia in the flat opposite. Time after time, she played the vapid love interest, characters so underwritten that they struggled to be one-dimensional. The trajectory of Pinto’s career in the years after Slumdog certainly didn’t suggest she would ever make a hard-hitting film about sex trafficking.
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