Merritt Wever is too good for Run: Why does her character have to spend time loathing her body?

The New Republic

"It is true that Wever does not necessarily resemble a typical leading lady," says Philippa Snow of Wever's new HBO series. "It is also true that this should be irrelevant. The fact is that Ruby Richardson should always have been played by a girl just like Merritt Wever, which is to say one who’s funny, sexy, sometimes melancholic-looking, as adroit at skids and pratfalls as she is at registering emotion, and extremely capable of breaking hearts. That this has turned out to be news to her, to say nothing of the industry that employs her, may explain why I cringed internally at the show’s numerous gags about her character’s seething self-hatred. Certain knowing critiques of the way that women loathe themselves can end up looking, from some angles, like the very thing they claim to be critiquing: jokes about our wobbling bodies, our lined faces, and the dumbness of our specifically feminine fixations. There are other ways to prove a woman’s real."