While promoting her new movie, Emma Thompson opened up about the body image issues she’s faced since her teenage years and shared how they made a nude scene in that film harder.
While it’s generally a little misleading to say that celebrities are just like us, there is some truth to that in the sense that money and fame don’t always solve our problems and can even make some of them worse.
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So while any of us can feel uncomfortable in our own bodies and worry that we’re not good enough, it’s not hard for those feelings to be amplified when so many eyes are always on you.
Not only is that insecurity common in people from all walks of life, but it can creep up no matter how talented and celebrated you are as a performer.
And for Emma Thompson, that was something she had to deal with head-on while filming her latest movie.
On June 15, Thompson went on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” to promote her newest movie that premiered on Hulu two days later.
It’s called Good Luck To You, Leo Grande and in it, Thompson plays a widow who hires the titular escort to help her achieve the kind of pleasure she never experienced with her husband.
And in the trailer for that movie, Thompson’s character makes it clear that she’s always been ashamed of her body.
Unfortunately, that’s a struggle that Thompson revealed she could relate to all too well and those long-held feelings particularly stirred up when she was preparing to shoot a nude scene.
In fact, the way she looked at herself made her unsure as to how she was ever going to do the scene. Because while Insider reported that she looked at medieval paintings of Eve for inspiration on how to pose, there was a bigger problem that was harder to get past.
In her words, “I certainly can’t stand in front of a mirror without trying to improve the way I look.”
Thompson said she believes her character found out how to look at herself with “a neutral gaze,” which prompted Colbert to ask if the movie changed how she looks at herself naked.
But as she put it, “I think that I started hating my body when I was about 14, and I think those neural pathways are well kind of carved into my soul.”
And while Thompson can find humor in her own struggles, they’ve made her concerned for other young women, who seem to develop them earlier and earlier in life.
As she said, “I know we laugh, but you think of all of those eight-year-olds out there going, ‘I don’t like my thighs.'”
This led Colbert to ask another pointed question of what Thompson would have said to herself at 14 when these body image issues started to develop.
To that, she said, “Don’t waste your time. Don’t waste your life’s purpose worrying about your body. This is your vessel. It’s your house. It’s where you live. There’s no point in judging it. Absolutely no point. But it’s very hard to do.”
And while this answer inspired applause from Colbert’s studio audience, it’s clear from what we now know that Thompson knows full well how hard taking that advice is.
h/t: Insider