Kristin Kreuk, star of “Smallville” and the upcoming CW series “Beauty and the Beast,” hopes to one day retire from acting and focus on producing, she told a Comic-Con audience on Friday.
Kreuk did not intimate this move was imminent, more that eventually she wants to transition into making more movies through her production company, Parvati Creative Inc.
“I’d like to move out of acting at a certain point,” she said. “Then I can’t do all of the silly movies that I’ve been doing that are wonderful and can start making them. I can tell the stories that have women in them that I wanna tell.”
Kreuk’s yearning to produce reflects a larger theme of the panel she was on, “Powerful Women in Pop Culture,” which featured a sextet of women who kick ass on the silver screen and the big screen discussing the massive gains made by women – and the challenges they still face.
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All of the panelists — Kreuk, Lucy Lawless, Nikki Reed, Kristin Bauer van Straten, Sarah Wayne Callies and Anna Torv — noted a very positive change in the roles they are being offered, and the number of female leads. Still, a laundry list of issues remains.
Near the top of that list is the one voiced by Kreuk — that while women may get better roles, they aren’t enough writing or directing opportunities. They aren’t getting to create as many of the ideas for films and television.
“We don’t have enough women directors,” Callies told the crowd about “The Walking Dead,” on which she plays Lori Grimes. They’ve had a few powerhouse female directors come in, she said, but “there are so few.”
Another issue is that film is less hospitable to women than television.
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“You look at TV now and a lot of the characters and roles out there for women in TV are fantastic,” Kreuk said. “I don’t know if that’s as true in film.”
The one apparent dissenter was “Twilight” star Reed, who said she didn’t feel limited or pressured being a young woman.
Then again, at the end of the panel, when asked to discuss a reccurring problem she brought up a big one – body image.
“We’d be lying if we said we don’t think about it, deal with pressure on a greater scale,” she said. “In specific cases in my career, it was talked about more than it should be. It affects not just the roles we play and our careers but who you are as a person. We could all do without that.”
So what do women need to do to further equality? Create.
"If you create an opportunity there may be resistance in some areas, but there is to everything," said Bauer van Straten from "True Blood." "There was resistance to the light bulb. The world just resists things."