Actress and comedian Melanie Lynskey was body-shamed on the set of 2000’s Coyote Ugly. In an interview about the upcoming season of Yellowjackets, Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci spoke with the Hollywood Reporter about surviving Hollywood as an actress—and that’s when Coyote Ugly came up.
Lynskey has never shied away from calling out Hollywood for the body shaming that she experiences on movie and television sets, so it’s no surprise she’s calling out the Coyote Ugly crew for its treatment of the actresses. Lynskey played the best friend from Jersey in the film about a group of young women working at a cowgirl-themed bar where the bartenders dance on tables and are skilled at “flare.” In the Hollywood Reporter interview, Lynskey claims that she and her female co-stars were forced to restrict their food intake to keep them as thin as possible. “All the girls had this regimen they had to go on. It was ridiculous,” Lynskey said. “I was already starving myself and as thin as I could possibly be for this body, and I was still a [size] four.”
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As someone in their twenties, Lynskey said the comments were even harder for her to deal with:
In your early 20s, so much of it is about beauty, how people respond to you and do people want to fuck you. Do people think you’re their best friend? Even the best friend thing, I started to be like, ‘I don’t want to do that too many times.
Throughout production, the Fargo actress was subjected to a lot of harassment about her body from the Coyote Ugly crew:
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.” Really intense feedback about my physicality, my body, people doing my makeup and being like, “I’m just going to help you out by giving you a bit more of a jawline and stuff.” Just the feedback was constantly like, “You’re not beautiful. You’re not beautiful.”
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Melanie Lynskey Recently Appeared in Candy
Recently, Melanie Lynskey starred as Betty Gore in Candy, a true-crime story about the 1980 ax murder of Texas housewife Gore by Candy Montgomery (played by Jessica Biel). The show premiered on Hulu on May 9.
Lynskey told Variety that the greatest challenge of playing Gore was finding a way to play her respectfully:
I wanted to make sure I was playing as true as I could version to life of her, which meant not sugarcoating anything that she went through. I think it’s an important conversation to have, she had postpartum depression, and she really was struggling. It’s tough when you’re playing a real person who’s not alive anymore to tell you how they feel. And I hope that I did okay. I hope that she feels represented.
You can view the original article HERE.
