Emma Thompson has insisted there are hordes of actresses “who simply don’t eat” so they will land jobs in Hollywood.
The 57-year-old actress has starred in her fair share of award-winning movies, but hit headlines recently when it was revealed she had shed the pounds after enlisting the Duchess of Cambridge’s diet guru to help her slim down.
However, during an interview on Swedish talk show Skavlan, Emma opened up about the movie industry’s fixation on actresses’ figures, admitting it had made eating disorders almost the norm in Hollywood.
“The anorexia – there’s so many kids, girls and boys now, and actresses who are very, very thin into their 30s, who simply don’t eat. They don’t eat,” she vented.
“Sometimes there are just some subjects that you absolutely have to make noise about because it’s so tedious and it’s gone on and on. It is evil what is going on out there and it is getting worse.”
Emma’s outspoken nature and strong feelings about the topic led to her almost quitting 2008 movie Brideshead Revisited. The actress starred along names including Hayley Atwell and Felicity Jones in the period drama, but was left fuming when she overheard that a producer had asked one of the female cast members to shed a few pounds.
“There was a wonderful actress in a film I did called Brideshead Revisited and the producer said to her, ‘Would you lose some weight?’ and she was exquisite and I said to them, ‘If you speak to her about this again on any level I will leave this picture. You are never to do that.'”
Hollywood’s obsession with appearance is one of the main reasons Emma has never moved Stateside. And the actress admits she finds herself being much more self-critical whenever she’s in La La Land herself.
“I never moved to the US… I couldn’t,” she said. “Can you imagine? Every time I go to Los Angeles I think ‘Oh god I am too fat to go there.’ I think they are saying to me when I arrive ‘You are fat and you are old. Go home’. L.A. is so mad and so hostile. It is a very strange place and I could not live there.”
