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Kat Dennings
(Momodu Mansaray/WireImage)

Kat Dennings Opens Up About Body-Shaming in Hollywood and How Inclusivity Is Changing the Game

It’s no secret that Hollywood took a long, long time to embrace body positivity. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, it was a nightmare for young actresses, as they faced endless body shaming while trying to make it big.

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One of these actresses was Kat Dennings, who began her career in 2000 with a guest appearance on Sex and the City and gradually went on to be a star. She’s recently opened up to People magazine about how difficult those early years were.

“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” she said. “There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back.” And yet, Dennings was a literal child at the time.

“It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I’m like, ‘How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane,'” she remembered. “For example, I was 12. I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.'”

Calling a 12-year-old “fat” can have a knock-on effect on their mental well-being, but it was a truly cut-throat world in Hollywood back then. Eating disorders were common, and celebrities were mocked by the media if they put on weight.

Luckily, Dennings had a good support system in the form of her parents, and she also had a healthy attitude with regard to the cruel words. “For some reason, it didn’t break my spirit,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’ll show them.’ I guess props to my parents, because they were like, ‘They’re idiots. Don’t listen to them.’ And I was like, ‘They’re idiots, I’m not.'”

Related: Sally Struthers Accuses Late Betty White of Body-Shaming, And an Old Golden Girls Feud Shows It Was Only the Tip of the Iceberg

Dennings believes the entertainment industry has gotten “much softer, kinder” when it comes to body diversity. “There’s body positivity, there’s inclusivity, there’s representation, and there was none of that before. It was really gross,” she said.

Many other actresses would agree with Dennings. Kate Winslet, for example, has spoken passionately about the shaming she faced in her ’90s Titanic era. “What kind of a person must they be to do something like that to a young actress who’s just trying to figure it out?” she said in an interview with 60 Minutes. But she had the same “I’ll just show you” attitude Dennings had, and now she’s one of the biggest A-listers in the world.

Keira Knightley, who like Dennings found fame in the ’00s, is another actress who faced the problem of her body seemingly being public property. With her it was different – she was shamed for being too thin. The media labeled her a bad role model for young girls and indicated she had anorexia. At one point, the Daily Mail even tried to claim pictures of her contributed to the death of a teen who did have the eating disorder. It was incredibly rough for her. “In that classic trauma way I don’t remember it,” she told The Times in 2024. “There’s been a complete delete, and then some things will come up and I’ll suddenly have a very bodily memory of it because, ultimately, it’s public shaming, isn’t it?”

Thankfully, we’ve now reached a point where it’s no longer considered appropriate to publicly shame an actress for looking a certain way. But Dennings is absolutely right about how “gross” things used to be.


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Author
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Sarah Barrett
Sarah Barrett (she/her) is a freelance writer with The Escapist who has been working in journalism since 2014. She loves to write about movies, even the bad ones. (Especially the bad ones.) The Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and the Star Wars prequels changed her life in many interesting ways. She lives in one of the very, very few good parts of England.