The “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Norma Rae” star opened up about the part she’ll never play.

Sally Field reveals role she always turns down: ‘Didn’t like it then, and it doesn’t appeal to me now’

The "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Norma Rae" star opened up about the part she'll never play.

Joey Nolfi

Joey Nolfi is a senior writer at *. *Since 2016, his work at EW includes RuPaul’s Drag Race video interviews, Oscars predictions, and more.

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May 8, 2026 10:41 a.m. ET

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Sally Field in New York City. Credit:

Dominik Bindl/Getty

- Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has opened up about the kind of role she's always turned down throughout her career.

- "I didn't like it then, and it doesn't appeal to me now," the star said in a new interview.

- Field's new movie* Remarkably Bright Creatures* debuted on Netflix on May 8.

Oscar-winning actress Sally Field has opened up about resisting a specific type of role throughout her storied career in Hollywood.

She's played a flying nun, a revolutionary pro-union textile worker, and a divorcée who discovered that her ex-husband cosplayed as the family's elderly British nanny, but there's one type of role the *Mrs. Doubtfire* and *Norma Rae* star has claimed she won't play.

“I never take to stories about women that are trying to find a man,” the 79-year-old two-time Academy Award winner said in a new interview with PEOPLE.

Actress Sally Field at the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscars Party.

Stefanie Keenan/WireImage

Field told the publication, “I didn’t like it then, and it doesn’t appeal to me now, because I think women are about so much more."

The star said that "life is so much more complicated than that," and she's opted to take alternate parts throughout her later career — including in Netflix's new *Remarkably Bright Creatures*, in which she plays an aquarium worker who bonds with a younger employee and an octopus in their care.

Sally Field says Burt Reynolds told her not to take her Oscar-winning role: 'He wanted to control me'

Sally Field recalls Robin Williams’ kind gesture on 'Mrs. Doubtfire' set after her dad died: 'That was Robin'

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While Field maintained that she won't take roles in which the central woman is "trying to find a man," she did star in 2015's *Hello, My Name Is Doris*, which followed her as the titular office worker who becomes infatuated with her younger coworker and attempts to pursue him.

Earlier in her career, including in the aforementioned 1979 drama *Norma Rae*, Field said she channeled a specific kind of emotion into roles that she felt were significant not only to popular culture, but to herself as a person.

"Being a little girl raised in the '50s and having a very complicated childhood with my stepfather and even my mother at times, I was filled with rage. Really filled with rage," she told PEOPLE. "And it was working with [acting coach] Lee Strasburg that allowed me to begin to tap into it, to not let it devour me."

While filming *Norma Rae*, for which she won her first Oscar in 1980, Field added, “I asked [director] Marty Ritt, ‘How angry can I be here?’ He said, ‘How angry are you?’ And I said, ‘Angry.’ And so that was the first time I was ever really able to learn how to tap into my own rage on film."

*Remarkably Bright Creatures *is now streaming on Netflix.

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