It’s never easy for America Ferrera to watch herself on screen, but there’s no way to avoid the experience when you’re in the biggest movie of the year—and especially so, perhaps, when you’re the face of one of its most beloved scenes. Playing Gloria, the wholly human foil to Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie doll, Ferrera commands the camera through a standout monologue that articulates writer-director Greta Gerwig’s core explorations of womanhood, feminism, and double standards. It’s gone viral over and over for months. “The first three times I watched it, I just held my breath and sort of squinted and tried to get through listening to my own voice—it was really, really hard at first,” Ferrera admits on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen to the full conversation below). “The first time I really enjoyed watching the movie—and also felt like I could enjoy my performance—was at the LA premiere…and my daughter, who’s three and a half, was sitting on my lap the whole time. I loved just having her with me.”

Cast Your 2024 Emmys Ballot

For Ferrera, a Critics Choice Awards nominee for best supporting actress and a strong contender for her first Oscar nomination, the moment encapsulates the larger Barbie phenomenon: an anticipation that “built and built and built,” and swept up everyone in its path. Ferrera has now seen Barbie in full five times, and she’s tracked the way it’s resonated around the world. Since the film was released right as the SAG-AFTRA strike began—thereby preventing any promotion of the Warner Bros.-distributed title on the actors’ part—Ferrera did something she never does: She scoured the web. “I was a bit obsessive about it,” she says with a laugh. She watched TikToks, read “every think piece” out there about Gloria’s big speech, embraced the many posts shipping Barbie and Gloria, and cheered on images of women in China defiantly donning hot pink. “I was eating it up,” Ferrera says.

And why not? While the Los Angeles–born Ferrera has enjoyed a rich career on television, winning an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her star turn on Ugly Betty and recently toplining NBC’s critical darling Superstore, Barbie not only marks the biggest movie of her career—indeed, that goes for most of the ensemble—but her first appearance on the big screen in seven years, going back to Ricky Gervais’s 2016 satire Special Correspondents. (She also starred in Dumb Money later in 2023.) She’d been preparing to direct her first film, I’m Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, and shift into a more autonomous Hollywood career, when she first got the call from Gerwig. The timing, she says, was serendipitous.

“A really big element of being an actor is having to be chosen over and over and over again, and the reality for me was that the kinds of roles that I wanted to do, the opportunities I wanted to show different parts of myself—they just didn’t exist,” Ferrera says. “It was actually a pretty empowering thing when I realized I’m going to have to go be a part of creating that…. So when I did get the phone call about Greta and Barbie, I wasn’t sitting there crying into a bag of Doritos…. I was in a really great place. And dropping that expectation that the phone was going to ring with some incredible opportunity liberated me in a lot of ways.”

This is in part because Barbie did give Ferrera the chance to do exactly that sort of acting—shaping a major character on a massive canvas, surrounded by exceptional cinematic craft. In her TV work, she was working on broadcast schedules, playing within brutally truncated shooting windows to land big character moments. On Barbie, she had time to prepare, to take the world in, to figure out her character—a working mom yearning for a moment in time, a past feeling she can’t fully articulate. “I’d be there even when I didn’t need to be there just to stay in the zone—I went to Barbie dance rehearsals, I learned the Barbie dance just because I like to learn choreography,” she says, grinning. “I did feel a building-up of energy and really wanting to get to express what Gloria’s journey was.” By the time she got to film the monologue near the end of the shoot, she was raring to go—and delivered it brilliantly. But the modulation of her performance outside of that big moment is equally impressive; Ferrera’s Gloria imbues the whole piece with a wounded, bursting vulnerability. “That sometimes felt like a push and pull. I could go and touch into the fun and the hyper-energy, but I also had to resist it in a way and stay grounded. That wasn’t always comfortable,” she says.

As the first phase of Barbie’s Oscar campaign winds down and Ferrera gears up for what’s next, she’s been in this industry long enough—with enough ups and downs—to be able to take stock of the extraordinary last few months with a nuanced perspective. “We have all kinds of projections of what success is and what it’s going to make you feel: ‘This was the thing that 16-year-old America imagined. One day I’ll star in a movie and it’ll be like Titanic and it will break records and I’ll get nominated for awards’—that for me existed from the outset, but it really has to be met with the reality, right?” she says. “And it’s just always so different in real life.” Well, maybe not this time.