Jennifer Lawrence is the latest celebrity to share her own “degrading and humiliating” experience as a working actress in Hollywood, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations.
Speaking at ELLE’s Women in Hollywood event, the 27-year-old said a female producer once made her stand in a “nude lineup” as a means to ‘inspire’ her to lose weight.
“A female producer had me do a nude lineup with about five women who were much, much thinner than me,” she told the event, People reports.
“And we all stood side-by-side with only paste-ons covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating lineup, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.”
Another producer on an unnamed film also asked her to “lose 15 pounds [almost 7 kilograms] in two weeks”, telling her another actress had already been fired from the project for “not losing the weight fast enough”.
Things only got worse when she tried to speak to someone about the unrealistic diet regimes she was being handed by those working on the film.
"He responded by telling me he didn't know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was perfectly 'f**kable'," she said, adding she felt "trapped" by those with more power than her.
"I let myself be treated a certain way because I felt like I had to for my career," the Oscar-winner said.
"I was young and walking that fine line of sticking up for myself without being called difficult, which they did call me, but I believe the word they used was 'nightmare'.
"I didn't want to be a whistleblower. I didn't want these embarrassing stories talked about in a magazine. I just wanted a career."
Lawrence wasn't the only one to share a harrowing tale at the event - Reese Witherspoon revealed she was first assaulted by a director when she was just 16 years old.
"This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, and a lot of situations and a lot of industries are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths," the 41-year-old said, according to E! News.
"I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I find it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings that I've been having about anxiety, honesty, the guilt for not speaking up earlier.
"[I feel] true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.
"And I wish that I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn't. I've had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don't speak about them very often."
But, she added, ever since the Weinstein scandal and hearing other famous faces tell their own stories, she's wanted to "speak up and speak up loudly".
"I actually felt less alone this week than I have ever felt in my entire career," she said.
LISTEN: The women of Mamamia Out Loud unpack Hollywood's Harvey Weinstein saga.
Top Comments
Do you think this discussion might also turn to a discussion about how uncomfortable and mostly unnessary the female actors feel about the 'required sex scenes" that the mostly male script writers and directors feel they 'need' to have in their films?
I'm not completely familiar with Jennifer's body of work, but it's likely that she was assessed nude for her role as Mystique in the X-Men franchise, that was a pretty unforgiving costume, if we want to point fingers. That was an unforgiving costume.
An interesting thing to note is, that while actresses like Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Lawrence are coming forward with anecdotes, they're not actually naming individuals. I'm curious as to what that means; are they accepting that to be a leading lady of Hollywood, despite this scandal, you still must be evaluated as an exceptional physical specimen and accept that as part of the process in gaining a multi-million dollar career?
To a degree, this is true of both leading actors and actresses, the inequity arises when the actresses are expected to bang or otherwise gratify men who are gatekeepers to their success.