America Ferrera Reacts to Young Girls Doing Her Epic Barbie Monologue: 'Hilarious but Also Super Sad'

America Ferrera's Barbie monologue immediately hit a chord with women when it hit theaters. But it's also speaking to a younger generation, the actress found out recently.

In this week's issue, the actress, 39, tells PEOPLE that she recently encountered a “young girl” who used the now-viral monologue — a speech about the "impossible" task of being a woman today — to audition for a theater program.

Though “hilarious” in a sense, Ferrera says it was “also super sad that 11-year-old girls resonate with that monologue and already feel like they know what it's saying."

The emotional speech comes at a pivotal moment in the film as Ferrera’s character, a Mattel employee named Gloria, tells a distraught Barbie (Margot Robbie) that she is good enough — and details why it is “literally impossible to be a woman.”

“You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line,” Gloria says in the film. “It's too hard, it's too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.”

The standout speech, which ultimately inspires the rest of the Barbies in Barbie Land to snap out of Ken's patriarchal brainwashing, also plucked the heartstrings of another demographic — mothers.

“I’ve had a lot of moms come to me and say, ‘I was watching with my kids, and afterward they said, Why were you crying?,’” she tells PEOPLE.

Also moved to tears by the speech were some of the films’ crew members, says Greta Gerwig, who directed and co-wrote the movie — not only 2023’s highest-grossing film but also Warner Bros.' biggest movie ever.

At a recent Q&A, Gerwig, 40, said that while filming the monologue — which Ferrera said she did “probably 30 to 50 full runs” of — the director “would watch people stop what they were doing and just start sobbing.”

According to Gerwig, who penned Barbie with husband Noah Baumbach, she wrote the now-iconic monologue herself, but it ultimately became a joint effort between herself and Ferrera.

The duo "would text each other anything related to it" as they refined the speech over several months before reaching the final version, she told The Cut.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Barbie is available to stream exclusively on Max.