Greta Gerwig says Jo Koy's Barbie joke was 'not wrong'

The star-studded Golden Globes audience may not have been laughing at host Jo Koy's attempted zingers on Sunday, but Greta Gerwig isn't too outraged.

In a new interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program, the Barbie director was asked what she thought of Koy saying that Oppenheimer “is based on a 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Manhattan Project, and Barbie is on a plastic doll with big boobies.” Gerwig is taking it in stride.

“Well, he’s not wrong," Gerwig said. "She’s the first doll that was mass produced with breasts, so he was right on. And you know, I think that so much of the project of the movie was unlikely because it is about a plastic doll. Barbie by her very construction has no character, no story, she’s there to be projected upon."

Gerwig continued, “the insight that [Barbie creator] Ruth Handler had when she was watching her daughter play with baby dolls, is she realized, ‘My daughter doesn’t want to pretend to be a mother. She wants to pretend to be a grown woman.'"

The magic of Gerwig's Barbie is that it takes this long-running brand of dolls and infuses it with modern ideas of feminism and patriarchy. Barbie star and producer Margot Robbie told EW last year that she thinks this fits in with the doll's history of controversy (of which, yes, the prominent breasts were the first example.)

“I think Barbie’s been capturing people’s attention since the day she was invented. She is an icon but she’s a very complicated one," Robbie told EW. "There’s been times when Barbie has been ahead of her times and there’s been times when she’s been behind her times, but she’s always been evolving. I feel like this movie’s the next evolution.”

After topping the 2023 box office and scoring several award nominations for Barbie, Gerwig's next project will be adapting C.S. Lewis' beloved fantasy book series The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix. But the Barbie phenomenon isn't over yet. The film won the Golden Globes' new award for box office achievement, and scored several nominations for the SAG Awards on Wednesday. Stay tuned to see how it fares at this year's Oscars.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• America Ferrera on the pressure of delivering her Meryl Streep-approved Barbie monologue
  
• Ryan Gosling had to 'make peace' with his Mouseketeer past to play Ken in Barbie
• Greta Gerwig on how old Hollywood and disco inspired Barbie