escaping the “sexy blonde” trap
On Jayne Mansfield, Margot Robbie and Sydney Sweeney
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Mariska Hargitay, best known for her role as the badass Olivia Benson on NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, recently released a documentary on HBO Max titled My Mom Jayne, wherein she confronts her initial impressions of her mother, Hollywood actress and sex symbol Jayne Mansfield. Through conversations with her family, people in her mom’s life, and a search through and for her mom’s belongings, Hargitay starts to discover who her mom really was beyond her public persona, and in turn, starts to heal her relationship with her.
Because her mother died in a car accident when Hargitay was only three years old, all of her opinions of her mother come from either family accounts or the press, and the press out there on Jayne Mansfield starts with sexy and blonde and doesn’t go much further. From the roles her mother accepted, to the voice she used in public, to the dumb blonde persona she assumed, Hargitay had a hard time understanding why her mother made the choices she did.
Hargitay spoke to several of her siblings throughout the documentary, relying on their memories, as they’re almost all older than her, to shape her new view of her mother. Mansfield’s eldest daughter, Jayne Marie Mansfield, provided a lot of information to the documentary, as she was with her mother in Texas before she even moved to Hollywood. Mansfield had dreams of becoming a serious actress and had been taking acting classes, and when she moved to Hollywood at the age of 19 (Jayne Marie was 3), she made ends meet by selling candy at The Wiltern Theater, teaching dance and modeling.
When Mansfield auditioned for Milton Lewis, the head of casting at Paramount Studios at the time, Mansfield recalls in an archival interview that “he just seemed to think that I was wasting my, as he said, obvious talents. And he lightened my hair and tightened my dresses and this is the result.”
Mansfield was happy to oblige as this was her way into the world of Hollywood film and stardom that she was so eager to be a part of. So she was marketed as a blonde bombshell and started landing stereotypical dumb blonde roles. Her daughter, Jayne Marie, remembers that she had gone from making ends meet to gainfully employed rather quickly. She started gaining immense amounts of popularity, most of which focused on her body, beauty and sex appeal.
She was in the room she had dreamed of being in, but once there, she never made it out. The dream was to transition to more serious acting roles, after having gotten her name out there. Unfortunately, despite getting a taste of a role that was less “cardboard cutout” and more “human being with feelings,” the well of those roles dried up. And when Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, it seemed to really hit Mansfield that she had to act now to get out of the same box that Monroe had been locked in.
Beyond her physical assets and synthetically blonde hair, Jayne Mansfield had a lot more to offer, but it didn’t seem anyone was interested. She told a reporter that “I feel that my figure has been publicized much more than my intellect and I would like to change that.” On the Jack Paar Program in 1962, she was asked about “the new Jayne Mansfield,” by a man who was much more interested in her remaining an object to ogle at than her becoming a subject with a voice, an opinion and an interest beyond appearing desirable to men like him.
Of her desire to change, he asked “How can you change? It’s like trying to hide a parachute.” He even admits that there’s a limit to what one can do in the box she was in: “You did all right. I mean, there’s a point at which you don’t go beyond…”. Jayne responded, “I’ve been someone else for a few years and I’m ready to be myself.”
After indulging his thinly veiled insults and outright misogyny with a smile and a laugh, Mansfield pulled out her violin to play a few bars, to plant a seed in Paar’s and the audience’s mind that she’s more than just her looks. Unfortunately, the audience and Paar could not have cared less, and Paar even interrupted a few bars in and said, “Who cares? Kiss me.”
It was really painful to watch Mansfield be questioned about her desire to become more than just an object for men to gawk at as if that’s a laughable aspiration. As if a woman aspiring to be anything more than of service to a man’s pleasure is preposterous and a waste of time.
Watching this documentary made me wonder how this same trap works today. Much is different today, obviously, but similar forces are at play when it comes to conventionally attractive actors, particularly very beautiful white women, who have come on to the scene and made a splash with their looks. But can they pivot in the way that Jayne Mansfield desperately wanted to?
This question reminded me of a video I’d watched years ago on YouTube from The Take called “How Margot Robbie Escaped The ‘Bombshell Trap’”. In this video, bombshells are described as actresses “who enjoy a fast rise to extreme fame, but quickly find themselves pigeon-holed and limited in their career options.” Much like Jayne Mansfield, Margot Robbie’s breakout role was as a sexy blonde in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Robbie played Naomi Lapaglia, Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) young, beautiful wife.
This role, as many bombshell roles do, “emphasizes her beauty above all, and views her at a distance through an audience surrogate’s eyes rather than as the point of view character with a fleshed-out inner life.” Even Robbie herself looked down on the role when it first came across her desk, thinking Naomi was a “superficial, gold digger.” It was her acting coach who reminded her to approach the role with empathy, and told her to think of Naomi in a different way: Naomi used the only tool she had, her beauty, to get what she needed in life from people who had more than her. Sound familiar?
I think Sydney Sweeney has had a similar rise to fame as a blonde bombshell, though less dramatic than Robbie’s or Mansfield’s. But the way that Sweeney has been able to navigate around the hurdles on that path to fame is similar to Robbie’s strategy: a quick pivot, roles that push back on the stereotype, “ugly” roles, and producing power.
(I personally think that Sydney Sweeney is a businesswoman who just happens to act, though that’s kind of besides the point. She also attended the Bezos-Sánchez wedding––so did DiCaprio, for that matter––so that screams to me that business is her main priority and everything else is secondary, including morality. Anyway!)
Robbie knew that the public’s adoration of her beauty could easily get in the way of her desire to be a real player in the industry. She told The Hollywood Reporter that after The Wolf of Wall Street, “I knew I needed to adjust people’s perception of me right then because otherwise I was just gonna be given [this one kind of thing].” Unfortunately for Mansfield, she didn’t make this pivot soon enough, and it was years into her career before she became vocal about her desires to be taken more seriously. Though the real issue here was that the people in power were not willing to bet on a serious Mansfield when they were currently making money on a sexy Mansfield. She didn’t hold the power to carve out her own path.
Robbie, on the other hand, was maneuvering much like a business woman. She booked big budget movies to keep getting her name out there, while also booking smaller projects that would show off her acting skills and showcase a more serious side. She also became a producer so that she had the power to give herself the roles that most interested her and to diversify her acting portfolio, rather than having to be at the whim of what a producer might want to see her in.
Mansfield was desired as a sex object, and so those were the roles that were being offered to her. And in that time, when men ruled the day so unilaterally, they were never going to be very interested in adjusting their perception of Mansfield. If they wanted a serious actress, they were going to go for someone who had already been established as one. Without the agency to give herself the roles and show the executives and the public what she was capable of, Mansfield was subjected to the idea that these male executives had of her.
Robbie went on to play roles that reflected the darker sides of being seen as a sexual object, like Bombshell (2019), a film about the reign of sexual predator Roger Ailes at Fox News, as well as women who were not known for their beauty but for their grit or their power, like Tonya Harding in I, Tonya (2017). Her production company, Lucky Chap Entertainment, helped her in this endeavor as she could now pick projects that she wanted to be a part of and work on every aspect of them, assuming control of her own professional destiny.
Similarly, Sweeney used her business prowess to create a relationship with Sony by working on Madame Web (2024) which then opened the door to their collaboration on projects that she really wanted to work on, such as Anyone But You (2023). She told GQ UK that Madame Web was ‘“a building block, it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony…. Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions.”’
Sweeney has become a major name in Hollywood after gaining publicity as Cassie Howard in HBO’s Euphoria, a high schooler with a desirable physique and a desperation for male attention. She is also partially nude in some scenes from the show, and riffed on the perception some of the public may have had about her as a result when she hosted SNL. During her monologue, she joked that if her five-year business plan to get into acting didn’t work out, her backup plan was to “show boobs.”
Even as a joke, Sweeney is acknowledging that the public pays a lot of attention to her physique, and this attention, however unwelcome, can put people on the map which then allows them to carve out a path for themselves that is more aligned with their goals, in her case producing and acting. She is more than just the way she looks, but she used the way she looks as a way to get her foot in the door, and then pivoted.
Nowadays, the Hollywood publicity machine has so many more cogs running at the same time, it’s virtually impossible for one person to be the focus of attention in the way that they used to be. It’s not a couple of big names now, it’s fifty or one hundred names. Entire casts are composed of “white boys of the month,” while films used to star only one. With a more heavily saturated market, perhaps it's easier to fly under the radar enough to pivot when you can, whereas Mansfield, whose career flourished in the 50s, was not the only popular actress working, but one in a group small enough where everyone fitting in their respective spots was imperative for the machine to keep churning.
Not to mention, Mansfield did not have the agency, or maybe the knowledge, to navigate the change she so desired, despite doing her best to vocalize it. It’s quite sad to see entire careers atrophy when the actor stops adhering to the arbitrary rules placed on them. And with her life ending so suddenly, it wasn’t possible for Jayne Mansfield to return later and begin again. Perhaps the silver lining is that now the pathway for transitioning from sexy blonde to serious actor is outlined enough that future young women might have an easier go at it than Jayne did.
Love this piece. Feels important and old news that is still the news in 2025.