‘Older men’ were a ‘mind f–k’ as a teen

Chloë Grace Moretz has been acting for most of her life, and she’s now revealing that she felt “infantilized” by “older men” when she was a teenager.

The 25-year-old actress has been onscreen since the age of 7— and landed the lead role in “Carrie” at just 14.

While appearing on the “Reign with Josh Smith” podcast, Moretz looked back at the “power struggle” she felt on sets where she was the lead, but she was just a teenager among older male co-stars and colleagues.

“There were a lot of moments where it wouldn’t and I was treated equally,” said Moretz, who recently declared that she has entered her “f – – k it era” after living for a time as a recluse.

“It was a really wild power struggle and power dynamic as a young girl who had worked for already 10, 11, 12 years, throughout my teenage years and was the lead of movies, but was still a kid in every sense of the word.”

“They might have children the same age as me and there was a really interesting rub that would happen that, I felt like I was always really fighting against trying to figure out to conduct myself in a way that I’ll be respected, so I can be respected on set and given the credit that I felt that I deserved.”

Moretz admitted that she struggled to “have a voice in the same game” and to advocate for herself when she was playing characters that were her own age at the time.

Fighting for parity with grown men on set at “14, 15, 16-year-old self is a really, really crazy kind of mind f – – k,” she said. “It was always odd from my first leading role when I was 14 in ‘Carrie’ … It was always really interesting to see who would be really unhappy with a young woman.”

By the time Moretz got the role of Stephen King’s Carrie White, originated by Oscar winner Sissy Spacek in the 1976 Brian DePalma film, she had already been working in the industry for nearly a decade.

“As I continued through having more important roles on set as I grew up, it was always very interesting to see the pushback that I would get from a lot of people,” Moretz said.  “The majority of it was older men for sure who would infantilize me. If I had real things to bring to the table, a lot of the time it would get shot down,” she added.

However, she said her experience as a teenage actress taught her how to propose ideas in a way that made it seem like it was one of the older men’s ideas.

“It would come back around and be like, ‘Oh my God, what a novel idea that you have on behalf of my character that I totally did not propose to you in no special way,’ ” she said. “But it was an interesting dynamic and as I grew up and as my characters grew up, I always had to be very sweet and very kind of back footed in the way that I proposed things, but strong.”

The “Kick-Ass” star also shared how important boundaries are to her after not growing up with any.

“I learned a lot of my boundaries in life and what I want in my friendships and what I want in my relationships … I think boundaries are super important,” she said. “And part of realizing your boundaries and actually enforcing your boundaries is speaking your truth without blame or judgement to people.”