None of us are beauties

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Helen Mirren delightfully stunned her fellow leading ladies by declaring that "none of us are beauties" in a recent roundtable about their craft.

The star, an Emmy contender for her work on MobLand, convened with the lovely Kathy Bates, Parker Posey, Niecy Nash-Betts, Cristin Milioti, and Keri Russell for The Hollywood Reporter's drama actress roundtable, where they waxed poetic about beauty and some of the worst career advice they've received, including being told to lose weight ("I went home and ate a cookie" instead, quipped Nash-Betts) or get plastic surgery.

Mirren's unexpected remark to her peers came after she revealed that she was told to get a nose job in her 20s. "Someone said, 'You’ll never get work if you don’t have a nose job,'" Mirren recalled. "I said no. I didn’t want to be a pretty actress anyway. I elected to be not so pretty."

When Bates remarked that an artist's "amazing performance" makes them "beautiful," Mirren said, "Looking at our faces around this table, none of us are beautiful."

Bates quipped in response, "Oh, get out of town! I feel more beautiful than I have in my entire life."

But Mirren doubled down.

"We’re not. None of us are beauties," the Oscar winner said. "We all have really different faces, very interesting faces."

"Kathy’s like, 'Speak for yourself,'" Russell quipped in response, laughing.

Bates, who has since spoken out about her health struggles, also recounted an agent advising her to keep her ovarian cancer diagnosis private back in 2003 in fear of her becoming the "poster child for ovarian cancer.”

The cancer survivor told the roundtable, "I think if I had come out at that point, maybe it would have helped some people."

The Matlock star recently spoke about struggling to book roles because she did not always have typical Hollywood star looks, telling Vanity Fair in an interview published earlier this week that the late Garry Marshall declined to cast her in 1991's Frankie and Johnny because he couldn't envision her as a love interest. (The film is an adaptation of the stage play Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; Bates originated the role of Frankie.)

"He couldn’t make the leap that people would see me onscreen kissing someone,” Bates said. “Me actually kissing a man onscreen — that would not be romantic.”

The full roundtable discussion premieres Sunday.