Melanie Lynskey spoke out candidly about the “heartbreaking” way her late friend Brittany Murphy once viewed herself.
The Yellowjackets star opened up about the pressures placed on Murphy, who died in 2009 at the age of 32, by the actor herself and the entertainment industry, during an interview with InStyle for the magazine’s Summer 2022 issue.
“I was friends with Brittany Murphy, and the way she viewed herself was always really heartbreaking to me - the things she felt she had to change to be a successful actor,” Lynskey recalled. “She was perfect just as she was, but people were trying to cast her as, like, ‘the fat one,’ because when she was a very young teenager, her cheeks were a little bit round.”
Lynskey then noted that it can be hard to fight against these labels once they’ve been decided.
“People tell you that you’re a particular thing, and it’s very hard to fight back against,” she added.
Elsewhere in the interview, Lynskey also spoke about her own experiences with body image and revealed that she’s particularly aware of societal pressures during interactions with her husband Jason Ritter.
“Sometimes, my husband will tweet things about thinking I look hot or whatever and a lot of people like it, and I said to him, ‘Isn’t it funny that if I was a Victoria’s Secret model and you tweeted the exact same thing, people would not respond the way that they do?’” she said. “People get excited because I look like I look, and my husband, he’s like a cute, young actor, but I am aware that some of the responses to him are like: ‘Good for you.’”
“It’s like, well, he got together with me because he found me attractive. It’s not like he’s throwing himself on the sword for the rest of mankind,” she continued. “And also - he had competition.”
The actor previously opened up about the pressures she faced to look a certain way early on in her career during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where she said that she was body-shamed while on the set of Coyote Ugly.
Lynskey told the outlet that “all the girls had this regimen they had to go on,” which she noted 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,” she continued. “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.’”
