Hollywood is synonymous with impossible beauty standards. Even the most stunning actor you can think of has probably been told that there’s something about their appearance that needs to be “fixed.” While some performers decide to go under the knife in hopes of improving their career prospects, plenty of others have flat-out refused.
Here are 19 actors who rejected advice to surgically change themselves for the industry:
1.
In 1995, Sandra Oh met with an LA agent who advised her to think about cosmetic surgery because she wasn’t “pretty enough” to be a lead actor. In 2018, Sandra told Vulture, “It was the way that she said, ‘Listen: I’m not going to lie to you. A lot of people are going to lie to you. But I’ve got nothing for you here. I have Suzy Kim’ — I’m just making up names — ‘she has an audition in like six months. There’s nothing for a year. My best advice for you is to go back home and get famous.'”
“There’s a lot of people in our community who can relate to this feeling. I had already done all I could do to get to that A level, which is star in theater, TV, film, and somehow, that wasn’t enough for someone to say, ‘I believe I can get you an audition.’ There’s like a dark needle or a nail that lives at the back of all of our heads, and that’s your fear. That’s like, ‘It is true. There’s nothing there. And she’s saying that she’s not going to lie to me. Other people are going to lie to you, but she won’t lie to you. She told the truth. Go back.’ I used a pay phone to call [director Sturla Gunnarsson] and was not able to stop crying. It just cut me at the knees.”
2.
Speaking on the Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Actress Roundtable in 2025, Dame Helen Mirren said, “I was told to have a nose job in my 20s… Someone said, ‘You’ll never get work if you don’t have a nose job.’ I said no. I didn’t want to be a pretty actress anyway. I elected to be not so pretty.”
3.
In her 2021 memoir Unfinished, Priyanka Chopra Jonas recalled her first meeting with a director after winning Miss World 2000. She wrote, “After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him. I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt. If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed,’ and he knew a great doctor in LA he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.”
She said the encounter left her feeling “stunned and small.” Not long after, she cut ties with that manager.
4.
In a 2010 blog post, Hook actor Dante Basco wrote, “One day I remember I had this conversation with my then manager about the possibility of me getting a nose job! Yeah… a friggin nose job! I don’t know, maybe I didn’t get a particular job, probably due to how I looked. See, growing up in Hollywood, there weren’t many Filipino actors, and there was absolutely no Filipino roles, so my jobs consisted of me playing anything and everything from any form of Latino to any form of Asian and even some Black or white roles for characters that they couldn’t find good enough Black or white kids. So this question of a nose job arises… I must have only been 14 and was seriously asked to give it some strong thought…”
He continued, “A nose job… First of all, it was the ’80s, and nose jobs were in. Of course, the manager [cited] people like Michael Jackson who got a nose job and how it helped his career (at least that’s what she said). Even my then-acting teacher told me Elvis Presley had a nose job early in his career (still not sure if that’s true). She even [offered] to set up the appointment to the doctor that did a friend of her’s nose. As a teenager, this is a weird thing to think about… Hell, thinking back on it now, it’s a little weird. The thing about it is, there were several people putting pressure on me about getting this procedure done, and not just business. I know that there are certain people in my family, one aunt for certain, that would’ve jumped at a chance to get their nose ‘fixed.’ And it’s a pretty big thing to go and change the thing smack dab in the middle of your face…”
“….Now I’m not sure if the actual appointment was set, but I do remember realizing something… See, my management and what I felt at the time, as ‘Hollywood,’ wanted me to get my nose ‘fixed’… ‘fixed,’ ‘changed’ … but ‘changed’ to what? I realized they wanted me to change my nose to look more like a white person’s nose. See, I’m Filipino, I’m not a Latin actor or light-skinned Black actor, who maybe if I just changed a little thing, like my nose… all of a sudden I can maybe pass for white,” he wrote.
“I just figured no matter what my nose looks like, I’m never going to be able to pass for white, and all those ‘white’ roles are never going to open up for me, at least not in that way, and ultimately, that’s not how I wanted to play this game in Hollywood… I planned to make it another way. So I kept my nose, my Filipino nose… this ethnic nose, anyway you look at it. This Basco nose, the same one that is on my dad’s face, his brothers’ face, my cousins’, and my grandmother’s… & I succeeded in this town anyways,” he concluded.
5.
In 2025, Winona Ryder told Elle that, recently, female directors have been advising her to start Botox. She said, “They’ll say, ‘Just relax your forehead. Relax.’ I’m trying to be a great actor, and they’re saying that over and over. It’s nice that people are talking about how it’s OK to age, but there’s still enormous pressure. Every role I get is for a mother, you know? My career has definitely shifted.”
“So, I think what I aspire to, finally, is to play the judge who’s like, ‘Chambers now, counselor! Too far!'” she added.
6.
In 2023, Rosie Perez told Variety, “I don’t want her [the agent she had around the time she did 21 Jump Street] to be canceled, but she told me that if I dyed my hair blonde and got a nose job, I ‘can get you more jobs. Because you’re not Black.’ I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. Like, thank you, fired.'”
After sacking her agent, Rosie “had nobody” and “had no money.” However, she found an ally in her Criminal Justice costar Jennifer Grey, who’d been pressured into a nose job that damaged her career. Rosie said, “Jennifer and I clicked instantly. I haven’t seen that woman in ages, but I just think she’s phenomenal. She’s like, ‘I cannot believe how racist this industry is.’ She picks up the phone and calls Jane Berliner at CAA and says, ‘You need to represent this actress.'”
7.
While Kirsten Dunst was shooting Spider-Man, a producer whisked her off to the dentist to have her smile straightened. She had no idea the appointment had been made. In 2024, she told GQ, “I was like, ‘No, I like my teeth.'”
She later felt encouraged by The Virgin Suicides director Sofia Coppola, who “loved” her teeth. Kirsten said, “I didn’t realize at the time. I realized it [later] in decisions I had made. Not to change teeth, not to blow up my lips, or whatever it is that everyone wants to look like. I still know to this day, I’m not gonna screw up my face and look like a freak. You know what I mean? I’d rather get old and do good roles.”
8.
At the 2017 Women in Film Los Angeles’ Crystal + Lucy Awards, Elizabeth Banks said, “The first agent I ever met in this industry told me to get a boob job. I was so grateful that I didn’t have enough money at the time to follow his advice. I also did not sign with him despite that.”
9.
Speaking on a panel at the 2024 Comic-Con International, The Boys actor Claudia Doumit said, “It’s a beautiful half-Lebanese, half-Italian nose. It’s very strong. And it was just kind of that, like, to get a nose job, and then I’d book roles that were, you know, the ingenue and pretty and the leading actress. And that was fed to me for many, many years. And I remember, ever since a young age, I thought to myself, ‘When I book my first job, I’m gonna get a nose job. I’m gonna get the pay for that and get a nose job.’ And then I booked my first job, and I didn’t get a nose job.”
She continued, “I didn’t get a nose job, and then I booked the next job. And I thought, ‘I’ll get it now.’ And I didn’t get a nose job. And then I kept booking jobs and not getting nose jobs. And I kind of realized one day that I was booking jobs with the way that I looked, and I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t need a nose job because I’m booking jobs. I’m doing the thing I love, and I’m doing it the way I look.’ And it’s not what the traditional narrative is. It’s not what a lot of people might think beauty is. But I think it’s beautiful, and I think I wanna see more big noses on women on the screen. So, go, baby.”
10.
In 2014, Julia Roberts told You magazine, “By Hollywood standards, I guess I’ve already taken a big risk in not having had a facelift. But I’ve told Lancome that I want to be an aging model – so they have to keep me for at least five more years until I’m over 50.”
11.
In 2011, Kate Winslet told the Telegraph that she’d never succumb to industry pressure to have work done. She said, “It goes against my morals, the way that my parents brought me up and what I consider to be natural beauty. I will never give in… I am an actress, I don’t want to freeze the expression of my face.”
And in 2024, she told Harper’s Bazaar, “I think people know better than to say, ‘You might wanna do something about those wrinkles.’ I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate.”
12.
In 2022, Lea Michele told Town & Country magazine, “Honestly, it’s all been one incredible dream on top of an incredible dream. [Growing up,] people would tell me to get nose jobs, that I wasn’t pretty enough for film and television.”
Previously, in 2019, she told Today, “I love my nose because it’s mine. Growing up, I worked on Broadway, and I always wanted to transition into possibly doing film and television. From a very young age, I must’ve been maybe only 13 years old, I started being told by managers and agents that in order to make it on television or be on covers of magazines, that I was going to have to get a nose job. I think that people should be able to make their own choices. If that’s something that someone wants to do, then great; it’s your body and it’s your choice. But no one was going to make that choice for me. And I didn’t want to do that.”
“I wanted to look at my face and have it be my face. And why I’m so grateful that I chose that — made that decision and stuck true to what was right for me — was because I did move to Los Angeles and I ended up landing a role that, maybe if I had looked different, I wouldn’t have gotten the job,” she said.
13.
In 2015, Halle Berry told Yahoo Beauty, “It is pressure. When you see everybody around you doing it, you have those moments when you think, ‘To stay alive in this business, do I need to do the same thing?’ I won’t lie and tell you that those things don’t cross my mind, because somebody is always suggesting it to me. ‘You know, if you just did a little bit of this and that, lift this up, then this would be a little bit better.’ It’s almost like crack that people are trying to push on you. That’s what I feel like. I just have kept reminding myself that beauty really is as beauty does, and it is not so much about my physical self.”
She continued, “Aging is natural, and that’s going to happen to all of us. I think of those women that I thought aged so beautifully, like Lena Horne. Even how Jane Fonda is aging — I don’t know what she has or hasn’t done, but she looks beautiful as she’s going about her way. I just want to always look like myself, even if that’s an older version of myself. I think when you do too much of that cosmetic stuff, you become somebody else in a way… We have to stop wanting to look like that decade before. We have to stop coveting that. Let it go and embrace it now and really be OK. It’s easy to say, I guess, but that’s the goal.”
14.
In 2017, Debra Messing alleged to Elle.com that A Walk in the Clouds director Alfonso Arau declared that she needed a rhinoplasty in front of everyone. She said, “I’d never been on a film before. I was doing a love scene with Keanu Reeves. We started filming, and the very famous director screamed, ‘Cut’ and said, ‘How quickly can we get a plastic surgeon in here? Her nose is ruining my movie.'”
“It was a shock. I was so confident coming out of graduate school with my master’s in acting. I’d studied in London, and I was so well equipped with skill sets, and then to walk on set and have that happen — I was reduced to an un-Hollywood nose,” she said.
“It’s taken me years and years and years to finally own my differences and to love what’s different about me, and to come face to face with a truth within my industry, within our culture. There is a very narrow definition of what a beautiful, vital, vibrant, interesting woman looks like, and that’s the thing we’re constantly fighting against. My entire career I’ve been swimming in that pond, where it’s like, ‘Oh no, you don’t look right,'” she concluded.
15.
In 2014, Sophia Loren told the Hollywood Reporter, “I always tried not to listen to these people. They were saying that my nose was too long and my mouth was too big. It didn’t hurt me at all because when I believe in something, it’s like war. It’s a battle. But even Carlo [Ponti, her husband] said, ‘You know, the cameramen, they say that your nose is too long. Maybe you have to touch it a little bit.'”
“And I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want to touch nothing on my face because I like my face. If I have to change my nose, I am going back to Pozzuoli.’ At that time, they used to do noses like a French nose with a little tip at the end — they liked that. Can you imagine me with a nose like that?” she said.
16.
During a 2023 appearance on You Quiz on the Block, K-drama star and The Marvels actor Park Seo-joon said, “I auditioned a bunch of times before I made my debut, and I failed to pass all of them. I was also often told off at auditions. I suffered from low self-esteem then… It was because of the way I looked. The standard of beauty was quite different back then; strong and sharp facial features were in trend. So, I hated how my eyes looked. A lot of casting directors told me to get plastic surgery. Some were even like, ‘What’s that face? What kind of world do you come from?'”
“As I repeatedly got told to get plastic surgery, I gradually lost my confidence. I kept asking myself, ‘Am I doing something wrong here? Maybe this path isn’t for me.’ It was difficult to continue pushing myself to try, going through all that. It wasn’t like I knew my future was going to be bright as well. But I toughed it out, and thankfully, things worked out for me,” he said.
17.
In 2023, Coronation Street actor Dame Maureen Lipman told the Telegraph, “Al Parker was a film agent who told me I’d have to get my nose done because I didn’t have a film face. He sent me to a plastic surgeon on Harley Street, where I realized that I could change my agent rather than my nose. In those days, they gave everybody the same nose – a little retroussé. I’m glad I didn’t have that because you can’t really play character parts terribly well with a retroussé nose.”
“I’m too frightened to have anything done, really. I might not like what I see, but at least it’s more or less what God gave me. I don’t want to look like someone’s pumped me up with a bike pump,” she added.
18.
In 2024, stage and screen actor Dame Sheila Hancock recalled what it was like not fitting ’50s beauty standards, telling the BBC, “I had acne, so I had a bad skin. Somebody saw me in Bromley Rep doing a performance as a model, and they asked me to go and see them in the office. He sat me under a lamp and said, ‘Well, you’ll have to have plastic surgery because my nose is so odd, you know?’ So I didn’t fit the pattern of what is best to look like as a woman, really, in those days.”
19.
And finally, in 2023, Ruth Wilson told the Guardian, “As an actress, everyone does [Botox and fillers]. Very few resist. I haven’t done anything – yet. But it’s in my head as like, ‘Well, do you decide not to and therefore potentially look older than your peers? Or do you just give in?'”
She continued, “We’re like, ‘Wow,’ today. But in 200 years, they’ll be looking back at images of women now going, ‘What were they doing?’ ‘What is that? You’re blowing your face and lips up.’ Yet it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. And women are part of that industry, perpetuating this ’empowerment.'”
