In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment and assault allegations, Jennifer Lawrence is the latest celeb to speak out about the “degrading” and “humiliating” experiences that are all too common for a working actress in Hollywood today.
While the 27-year-old actress told People that she was not personally sexually harassed by Weinstein, whom she worked with five years ago, she did share a story about a time she was pressured to drastically change her body for a role.
At the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards on Monday, the “mother!” actress said that early on in her career, she was told by a producer to lose 15 pounds in two weeks, and that another actress had been fired from the project for failing to lose weight in time.
It gets worse.
“During this time a female producer had me do a nude line-up with about five women who were much, much, thinner than me. We all stood side-by-side with only tape on covering our privates,” she said, adding that the producer told her to “use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.”
When she tried to stand up for herself, she recalled, another producer told her “he didn’t know why everyone thought I was so fat, he thought I was ‘perfectly f—ckable.’”
Lawrence told People that she was “deeply disturbed” to learn about the Weinstein allegations. At the Elle event, she said that it has been “harrowing” to hear all of the stories of women who have come forward about their experiences with sexual harassment, yet “oddly unifying.”
“It’s so fundamental to the female experience to be mistreated and feel ashamed of it or worse, to be made to feel ashamed, but thanks to the women before us who [have] fought for our right to vote, for our right to choose, we are now living in a somewhat confused world, but confused isn’t bad, confused is progress,” she said.
