Rebel Wilson was sort of thrown into acting.
“It was so embarrassing,” she said of the time her mother dragged her to an acting class when she was 14. “I’m there. My face is red from crying. My mom has left. I’m stuck for the next 90 minutes. The teacher came up and asked me my name, and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Rebel,’ in an American accent. It was the only way I could deal with this traumatic situation. I became a character instantly. And then I just started making stuff up.”
The experience worked out well for the Australian actress. However, her current success didn’t come without some struggle. She didn’t seem to be getting any roles even though “I thought I was killing it on stage.” After visiting an agent, she was told “Well, you’re not going to get a job on Home and Away as a bikini beach babe.”
“I was really pissed off,” Wilson said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “Don’t they see I’m talented? Don’t they see that I’m funny and interesting? But of course nobody did.”
Wilson wrote her first play, The Westie Monologues, which finally helped gain her some acclaim in Australia. Then Hollywood started paying attention. “During that period I had come close to getting into a lot of different things, but no one had the guts to cast me,” she said. “It’s like what happened when I first started out in Australia: No one had the guts to say: ‘She’s good.’”
Now, Wilson is appearing in the film Pitch Perfect, where she’s proving to be a bright new voice in the comedy world.
