Laura Harrier has said she is pleased to see the modelling industry changing as it was "unapologetically racist" in her day.
The 29-year-old started out as a model before becoming an actress and said "it was different then".
She told Marie Claire magazine: "Girls have so much more individuality now and different types of women are celebrated.
"When I was a model, it was literally just skinny white Russian girls, so nobody was booking me for jobs.
"I'd go to meetings at agencies in Paris and they'd sign me, and then they'd say, 'Oh, we already have a black girl'.
"It was just unapologetically racist. Fortunately, I think that's changing."
Harrier landed her first film role in 2014 and has since starred in movies such as Spider-Man: Homecoming and BlacKkKlansman.
She said of future roles: "I want to do romantic comedies and other films in which you don't see people who look like me; movies where you've never really seen people who don't look like Kate Hudson.
"I don't know what people's thought process was when they believed that audiences couldn't connect to seeing people of colour fall in love."
To read the feature in full, see the September issue of Marie Claire, out today.
It is also available as a digital edition through Apple Newsstand.
By Julia Hunt
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