Emma Thompson: Hollywood’s Anorexia Problem Is ‘Getting Worse’

Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson slammed rampant anorexia within Hollywood, calling it “evil” and “terrible” in an interview this week.

While talking candidly on the Swedish talk show Skavlan, Thompson revealed how the film industry remains fixated on the weight and size of actresses, explaining how she once almost quit a job over the problem.

“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,’” Thompson said of the incident, according to the Daily Mail.

Thompson went on to not only blast the left-wing film industry, but also accused the French fashion industry of pressuring models into eating disorders.

“It is evil what is going on out there and it is getting worse,” Thompson continued. “The French fashion industry said they would get rid of size zero and they didn’t. Not only they didn’t but it continued.”

“Sometimes there are subjects you have to make noises about,” Thompson said. “It has gone on and on.”

The 57 year-old actress added that Hollywood’s obsession with appearance has made her never want to live in Los Angeles, the center of the entertainment industry.

“I never moved to the US. I couldn’t. Can you imagine,” Thompson said. “Every time I go to L.A. 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,” she added. “It is a very strange place and I could not live there.”

Thompson has long been a critic of Hollywood, just last year blasting the film industry for hiring untalented actors solely because they have large social media followings.

“We’re casting actors who have big [social media] followings so the studios can use their followings to sell their movie,” Thompson said at the time. “The actors are becoming attached in the sort of business way to their social media profiles, and I think that’s a disaster.”

In 2015, Thompson criticized Hollywood for suggesting that treatment of women in the film industry had improved, saying it was “still completely sh*t actually.”

“I don’t think there’s any appreciable improvement and I think that for women, the question of how they are supposed to look is worse than it was even when I was young,” Thompson said.

“When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world and when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women and I find that very disturbing and sad,” Thompson said.

Thompson has won two Oscars in her decades-long career in Hollywood; a Best Actress award in 1992 for her role in the romantic drama Howard’s End, and a screenwriting Oscar for the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility.

 

John Binder is a contributor for Big Hollywood. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.