If you didn't have enough reasons to adore British actress Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Love Actually), the Oscar-, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winner is giving you one more: Thompson does not hold back about her thoughts on body shaming in Hollywood.
Thompson — who plays Mrs. Potts in the newly released live-action remake of Disney's Beauty and the Beast — told the Swedish talk show Skavlan that during filming 2008's Brideshead Revisited, she threatened to walk off the set after one of her female costars was asked to lose weight, US Weekly reports.
"If you speak to her about this again on any level I will leave this picture. You are never to do that," Thompson recalls telling the offending producer.
In a 2015 interview with Britain's Evening Standard, Thompson's costar in Brideshead Revisited Hayley Atwell recounted having been bullied for her weight as a child and mentioned that Miramax (the studio behind Brideshead Revisited) had asked her to lose weight for the film. Atwell told the Evening Standard that her initial reply was to say, "OK, I suppose I should."
But that was before Thompson got to her.
"You’re not a model. You’re an actor," Atwell says Thompson told her. She added that the studio ultimately "accepted me for who I was," and that "if I’ve ever had an insecurity about myself in this industry, Emma always has an amazing ability to say something to put it all into perspective so that you don’t hate yourself."
Thompson says the pushing of an often-unattainable body standard affects not just movie stars, but everyone.
"It's evil what's happening and what's going on there, and it's getting worse," she told Skavlan of the pressure put on all actors (not just women) to look a certain way. "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."
Which is why Thompson says she feels it is essential that she continue to speak out and call attention to what she sees as a major cultural problem: "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."
