'Barbie' director Greta Gerwig says that everyone on set cried during America Ferrera's monologue

• Greta Gerwig said that America Ferrera's monologue in "Barbie" left everyone on set in tears.
• The monologue deals with the inherent contradictions of being a woman.

Greta Gerwig said that America Ferrera's monologue about womanhood brought everyone to tears on the set of "Barbie" — including the men.

Ferrera delivers one of the most important moments in "Barbie" when her character Gloria, a human emotionally connected to Margot Robbie's stereotypical Barbie, spontaneously fires off a monologue about all of the various contradictions inherent to womanhood, and the impossible expectations that women face. It manages to snap Barbie out of her defeatist funk, and the pair use Gloria's words to "deprogram" the other Barbies from their patriarchal brainwashing.

Gerwig told The New York Times that after a few takes, she found herself in tears.

"Over the course of a long time prepping it, we really embroidered it with her own specificity and talked about her experiences and her own life, and three takes in, I was crying," Gerwig told the publication of collaborating with Ferrera on the scene. "Then I looked around, and everyone was crying — even the men were tearing up."

Gerwig told The New York Times that though Ferrera's monologue is most specifically about womanhood, the "tightrope" that she describes in it isn't limited by gender — everyone has to manage those kinds of expectations. While reflecting on the scene in an interview with The Atlantic, Gerwig said that men also have a "similar" set of limiting expectations.

"In that moment of doing that monologue, she was giving people permission to step off that tightrope," Gerwig told the Times. "I don't think I realized until then that's what that moment was for. She had a piece of the puzzle in her as an actor and collaborator and artist that explained it back to me."