In a recent interview, Melanie Lynskey described, in detail, the extremely harsh body-shaming she experienced on the set of 2000’s Coyote Ugly. Body-shaming female celebrities is nothing new, but it can still be jarring to hear the specifics, especially when they come from an era before the word “body-shaming” was even a thing.
“It was ridiculous. I was already starving myself and as thin as I could possibly be for this body, and I was still a [size] four,” Lynskey told The Hollywood Reporter. “That was already people putting a lot of Spanx on me in wardrobe fittings and being very disappointed when they saw me, the costume designer being like, ‘Nobody told me there would be girls like you.’” She described “Really intense feedback about my physicality, my body, people doing my makeup and being like, ‘I’m just going to help you out by giving you a bit more of a jawline and stuff.’”
Melanie Lynskey at the Coyote Ugly premiere in 2000.Ron Galella/Getty Images
Lynskey played the best friend to Piper Perabo’s main character in Coyote Ugly, which she said was an archetype she didn’t want to fall into too much. Because when you’re in your early twenties, Lynskey noted, so much of how people perceive you is about fuckability. “Just the feedback was constantly like, ‘You’re not beautiful. You’re not beautiful,’” she said.
Even more body-policing fell on Lynskey’s Coyote Ugly co-stars. “But the scrutiny that was on Piper [Perabo], who’s one of the coolest, smartest women, just the way people were talking about her body, talking about her appearance, focusing on what she was eating. All the girls had this regimen they had to go on.”
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