Lily Collins was praised by a friend for being underweight while filming her new movie, and that is not okay
Actress Lily Collins just got real about everything that’s wrong with our culture’s obsession with weight. In an interview with The Edit, Collins recounted how someone complimented her weight loss — when she was literally underweight to portray a character with anorexia in the Netflix movie To the Bone.
Collins said, "I was leaving my apartment one day and someone I've known for a long time, my mom's age, said to me, 'Oh, wow, look at you!' I tried to explain [I lost weight for a role] and she goes, 'No! I want to know what you're doing, you look great!' I got into the car with my mom and said, ‘That is why the problem exists.’
In fact, Collins lost so much weight for the role that she didn’t even recognize her body at a certain point.
“There’s a scene where I’m taking my clothes off to be weighed by Carrie Preston, my stepmom in the movie,” she said. “[She] takes a photo on her phone and shows it to me. I didn’t think she’d actually take one but she did. I saw myself in the photo and my heart dropped.”
The actress also admitted that she had to decline doing photo shoots while filming because she just didn’t weigh enough for her body type.
Needless to say, this is disturbing.
Collins plays a character who is dangerously underweight (she lost weight under the supervision of a nutritionist in real life to reflect that physical reality). The fact that someone not only thought she looked healthy, but “looked great,” reflects a grave problem with standards of beauty in our culture. As far as we’ve come with messages of body inclusivity and self-love, it’s also clear that harmful perceptions of women’s bodies remain.
Thank you, Lily, for bringing this to our attention — and also reminding us that there is still important work to be done on this front.
