‘There was a lot of stress’: Kristin Davis opens up about the terrible pressure she faced to stay thin
Actresses active in Hollywood in the ’90s, a time when the entire world seemed to be gripped by the most intense fatphobia, still remember what a terrible era that was for women.
It was a bizarre time to grow up in. Every day, headlines screamed about a different public figure putting on weight and how embarrassing that must be for them. Paparazzi deliberately snapped female celebrities at unflattering angles. Many teenage girls developed eating disorders because of the intense pressure to be thin, thin, thin. It was awful, and Sex and the City actress Kristin Davis wasn’t spared from the mania.
In a new interview with People magazine, she reminisced about her days as Brooke Armstrong on Melrose Place in 1995. While she enjoyed working on the show overall, “There was a general vibe on the set … that was difficult, about the thinness situation.”
The producers, it seemed, were obsessed with keeping Davis thin. Davis only discovered this when her co-star Thomas Calabro dropped by her trailer to compliment her on her body, saying that although the show’s producers were “really stressed,” it was “amazing that we have a woman who has curves.” Davis was surprised by this sudden focus on her weight and went to an unnamed producer to ask what was going on.
“He was like, ‘We think you look beautiful,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, and?’ He goes, ‘Just don’t gain any weight,'” Davis remembered.
Those words had a terrible knock-on effect on the young actress. “Every single person [on the set] was gorgeous and super skinny,” she said, “So I was like, ‘This is what I have to do.’”
Davis began a difficult exercise regime and developed an eating disorder. “I was frustrated. I was trying to do the thing. Of course, I’m sure I wasn’t eating, I have no idea. I don’t remember the eating part.”
Things got so bad that at one point, she fainted in a parking lot. “Sometimes I couldn’t remember my name. It was a lot,” she said. But the chilling thing is, driving a woman to collapse was apparently seen as a totally normal thing in the entertainment industry. No one raised any concerns.
“It was normal for a long time. You could look at it either way,” Davis told People. “But I mean, there was a lot of stress. If you had hips, it was a situation.”
Davis isn’t the only ’90s actress who was pressured to lose weight to a worrying degree. Demi Moore, recently nominated for an Oscar for her role in the horror film The Substance (a film that criticizes the damaging beauty standards women face), spoke to Elle in November about how she also developed an eating disorder. “There is a lot of torment I put myself through when I was younger,” she said. She remembered how a producer once pulled her aside and told her to lose weight, and like Davis, it sent her spiraling. “It was very embarrassing and humiliating. But that’s just one thing. How I internalized it and how it moved me to a place of such torture and harshness against myself, of real extreme behaviors, and that I placed almost all the value of who I was on my body being a certain way—that’s on me.”
Moore shouldn’t have been body-shamed in the first place, and Davis shouldn’t have experienced that either. They were far from the only ones, too. Kate Winslet recently spoke about her horrific experiences as well. Society treated the bodies of women like public property in the ’90s and beyond (and often still does). The producers and other influential Hollywood figures who told them to lose weight and triggered them into eating disorders are the ones who should be ashamed.
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