"I was 23, and that was my first professional job. Anybody who has curly hair knows you don't want it to be brushed out because it becomes a never-ending tangle"
About this Quote
At 23, Judy Davis frames “first professional job” the way actors often remember their origin story: not as a triumphal debut, but as a moment when your body becomes part of someone else’s plan. The curly-hair detail lands like a small, domestic truth, yet it’s really a quiet protest against the machinery of “professionalism” that treats people as surfaces to be managed. Anyone with curls recognizes the scenario: a well-meaning brush turns texture into chaos. Davis uses that everyday specificity as a proxy for a larger kind of mishandling.
The line works because it’s funny without begging for laughs. “Anybody who has curly hair knows” is a soft, inclusive invitation, but it also draws a boundary: there’s lived experience here that outsiders routinely ignore. In entertainment, that ignorance becomes policy. Hair, like accent, posture, even personality, gets “corrected” to match someone else’s idea of what reads on camera or fits a role. The “never-ending tangle” isn’t just a grooming problem; it’s what happens when an industry standardizes you—then acts surprised when the result is messier than what you started with.
There’s also a subtle career subtext: early jobs teach you the rules by violating you. Davis compresses a whole lesson about control, vulnerability, and credibility into a single tactile image. It’s not a speech about exploitation; it’s the kind of anecdote that makes the point sharper because it refuses to inflate itself.
The line works because it’s funny without begging for laughs. “Anybody who has curly hair knows” is a soft, inclusive invitation, but it also draws a boundary: there’s lived experience here that outsiders routinely ignore. In entertainment, that ignorance becomes policy. Hair, like accent, posture, even personality, gets “corrected” to match someone else’s idea of what reads on camera or fits a role. The “never-ending tangle” isn’t just a grooming problem; it’s what happens when an industry standardizes you—then acts surprised when the result is messier than what you started with.
There’s also a subtle career subtext: early jobs teach you the rules by violating you. Davis compresses a whole lesson about control, vulnerability, and credibility into a single tactile image. It’s not a speech about exploitation; it’s the kind of anecdote that makes the point sharper because it refuses to inflate itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Job |
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