Greta Gerwig is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
The 40-year-old multihyphenate has been nominated for four Academy Awards, once for directing "Lady Bird" and three times for her writing. Her latest Best Adapted Screenplay nod is for "Barbie," the blockbuster she directed and co-wrote which raked in over $1.4 billion at the global box office.
With such a gold-plated resume, it stands to reason that Gerwig's talent has been apparent to everyone from the start. But in a 2016 interview, the director said there wasn't a single masters program that wanted her when she graduated from college in 2006.
"I got rejected from every graduate school I applied to," she once said in an appearance on the "Employee of the Month" podcast. "I applied as a playwright to Yale, Juilliard and NYU and got a universal 'No thanks.'"
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The rejection pushed the "Frances Ha" actor into the world of independent film. By the following year she had a co-writing credit on Joe Swanberg's "Hanna Takes the Stairs", which she also co-starred in.
The challenge of breaking into the industry also had another side effect: for years, Gerwig was hesitant to negotiate her salary. In a 2020 interview with CNBC Make It, she said she worried about asking "for too much."
"I always have this sense of, 'Don't negotiate, just take whatever they'll give us,'" she said at the time. "Because I'm just so scared that I won't be able to make a movie."
Money Report
Regardless of whether she takes home a statuette for "Barbie", Gerwig isn't facing much rejection these days. She has a writing credit on next year's "Snow White" film and was recently tapped by Netflix to adapt "The Chronicles of Narnia".
And as far as those grad schools that didn't accept her go?
"I don't know," she said. "I think they made a mistake."
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