Women are the story, Jennifer Lopez says in ELLE’s annual celebration of Women in Hollywood. “We have to be able to stand in our own power and say, ‘We’re not just on the periphery.’” As Fantasia Barrino Taylor puts it, we must tell ourselves: “I am the award. I am the trophy.”
Lopez, Barrino Taylor, and the seven other honorees here are changing the face of the film industry—literally, by becoming the stars that they desperately wanted to see onscreen. “That’s what I signed up for as an actor—to be a reflection of the world that I actually live in, to represent the person who doesn’t feel she has a voice and who isn’t seen,” says Danielle Brooks. “Even to represent myself.”
Representation has been a through line for many of this year’s Women in Hollywood honorees, from Eva Longoria, who talks about why she has made it a personal mission to tell complex Latin stories onscreen: “Hollywood gets to decide what heroes look like, and they never look like us,” to Lily Gladstone, who could become the first Native person nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her star turn in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon: “Seeing yourself represented gives you a sense of your place in the world,” she says.