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Anya Taylor-Joy
The Golden Globe winner revealed that there was a point in her career where she didn't feel confident about the roles she was set to play.
“So, I got Jane Austen’s Emma as a job, and that really panicked me, because it was a role that was supposed to be beautiful from the offset, and I hadn’t done that — I’d played creatures, outsiders, whatever,” she explained to The Hollywood Reporter in June 2021.
Taylor-Joy revealed that this "triggered some childhood trauma," and she wasn't sure she could keep acting. The Florida native ended up working an entire year straight so she could star in Emma, Last Night in Soho and The Queen’s Gambit.
“I had, collectively, a week off that entire year; it was crazy, and I was already starting off at an emotional space where I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can do this,’” she said at the time. “But it’s the year that has most changed me. I just fell in love with my job again.”
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Laverne Cox
While speaking on a Paley Center panel in June 2021, Cox admitted being cast in Orange Is the New Black was a major turning point for her. "I was in rent arrears on my apartment, I had rolled back rent and I was in all kinds of debt and I was going to give up acting actually, a few months before I booked Orange," she recalled. "I had turned 40 that year and had a breakout moment and I was in debt and things weren't going the way I hoped they would."
Before her big Netflix gig, her "dream of being a working actress" seemed out of reach. "I was just like, 'I've got to do something else. Who do I think I am? I'm a Black trans woman. No one's ever done this before, let me go and do something, have a real job or something.' ... I was studying for the GRE and then the audition for Orange happened and I didn’t go to grad school. Orange turned out to be my grad school."
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Brie Larson
Before winning an Academy Award for Room in 2016 and becoming Captain Marvel in 2019, Larson contemplated ending her years-long career. “It just wasn’t working the way I wanted it to,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. “All the kids I went to school with were going to college and I was still trying to do this thing called ‘acting’ and not going very far.”
The Kong: Skull Island star added, “What’s weird about this profession is that no one can really tell you when you are delusional. I used to wish that I’d wanted to be an athlete, because it’s easy to quantify if that’s working — just measuring your speed!”
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Kristen Stewart
Very early in her career, the Happiest Season star pondered the possibility of life outside of acting. “I decided a year after not getting any commercials, ‘F--k it. I won’t make my mom drive around Los Angeles anymore,’” Stewart told Newsweek in 2012. “I also got so nervous for every single audition. I was just dying. I had one appointment left and my mom said, ‘Have a little integrity and go to your last one.’ And it was The Safety of Objects. If I hadn’t gotten that, I would have been done.”
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Jennifer Aniston
The Morning Show star admitted in 2020 that there was one job that led her to contemplate ending her career. “It was after a job I had completed and I was like, ‘Whoa, that sucked the life out of me, and I don’t know if this is what interests me,’” she said on the “SmartLess” podcast, noting that she likely would have pursued a career in interior design.
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Emma Watson
It may be hard to imagine anyone else but Watson playing Hermione Granger, but the Perks of Being a Wallflower star nearly quit the Harry Potter franchise to pursue higher education. Harry Potter producer David Heyman told Glamour U.K. in 2013 that the actress “was quite academic and was very keen in pursuit of schooling and was wrestling a little bit more than the others.”
The Brown University graduate also contemplated quitting acting altogether because she didn’t enjoy fame. “I’d walk down the red carpet and go into the bathroom. I had on so much makeup and these big, fluffy, full-on dresses. I’d put my hands on the sink and look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this?’” she recalled to Vanity Fair in 2017. “I didn’t connect with the person who was looking back at me, and that was a very unsettling feeling.”