Long before her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Darcy Lewis, actress Kat Dennings said she received some disparaging comments about her body from a few casting directors very early in her career. Dennings, who is currently starring in the ABC sitcom Shifting Gears with Tim Allen talked to People about the type of comments she was subjected to as young as 12 years old, and how she didn't let them bother her.

“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” Dennings said. “There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. There was a lot of and people would not hold back,” she said. Dennings, who also starred in the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, added that casting directors could be “very cruel” when they were “talking about a child.”

“It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I’m like, ‘How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane,’” Dennings said. “For example, I was 12. I’d go into an audition, and I’d do it, and my manager would call me, and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go? And they’d be like,,’” she recalled.

However, Dennings said she chose not to let the comments bother her and believed they were in the wrong. “That was my attitude. For some reason, it didn’t break my spirit. I was like, I’ll show them,’” she laughed. “I guess props to my parents, because they were like,

She added that back then things were different for a young woman in Hollywood, but that today things are “much softer, kinder.” She added, “There’s body positivity, there’s inclusivity, there’s representation, and there was none of that before. It was really gross.”

The Thor and Wanda Vision star’s latest project, Shifting Gears, premiered on Jan. 8 on ABC and has set an audience record for the network. Per Deadline, in the first seven days after the show premiered, across ABC, Hulu, Hulu on Disney+, and digital. The sitcom had 6.2 million same-day viewers, but that number rose 173% over the course of the week.

Shifting Gears is the strongest series debut for ABC since The Conners, a spinoff of the classic sitcom Roseann, premiered in 2018. It’s also ABC’s most-watched streaming debut. In the show, sitcom veteran Tim Allen plays Matt Parker, a widower who owns a car restoration shop who takes in his estranged daughter, Riley (Dennings), and her two kids.

Dennings said the show is about trying to balance life with relatives that they may not agree with but still love. “That’s the goal. That’s a testament to the writing and the directing and knowing when to pull it back and how to play it and things like that,” Dennings told Collider.

that we can really balance each other out in all these scenes, and we know what to do with them so that it’s still fun. Like you said, we all have a family member or a friend or somebody at work that we just cannot agree with, but we love them anyway. It’s like, 'Let’s not start this conversation.' We all have that. It is a very relatable situation and there’s just endless potential for comedy with that kind of thing.to do it. That’s what I hope,” Dennings said.

Shifting Gears airs on ABC and streams on Hulu.

Source: People