Emma Thompson Once Threatened To Quit A Movie After Producers Asked Another Actress To Lose Weight

During the same interview with the Scandinavian TV show Skavlan (via E! News) last week in which Emma Thompson admitted she was once asked out by Donald Trump, she explained that she almost quit a film over the fat shaming of a co-star.

It all started after Emma joked that she’s too fat and old to live in Los Angeles. That turned to a conversation about how thin Hollywood expects actresses to look, which brought on Emma’s story. Emma said that while filming 2008’s Brideshead Revisited, a few producers asked an actress on set if she wouldn’t mind dropping a few pounds. Emma was horrified that they would ask an “absolutely exquisite” actress to lose weight, and she let them know she wasn’t into that kind of talk.

“I said to them, ‘If you speak to her about this again on any level, I will leave this picture.’ You are never to do that. It’s evil what’s happening and what’s going on out there, and it’s getting worse…Sometimes there are some subjects you just have to make noises about, because it’s gone on and on.”

Emma also slapped at the French fashion industry by saying that they’re partly to blame for saying they’d get rid of size zeros and not following through on that promise. Oh boy, Karl Lagerfeld just made a new enemy. I bet he’s sending a box containing a rotten cake addressed to “Nanny McPhee Tubby McFat” over to her house as we speak.

Asking an actress to lose weight on a film like Brideshead Revisited makes no sense. Brideshead Revisited is about a bunch of rich people who live in a rich person estate around the early part of the 1900s. If Downton Abbey has taught me anything, it’s that rich people in the 1900s barely wiped their own asses and I’m sure the servants would carry them from the dining room to the parlor if they asked. So having super-thin actresses playing pampered types is historically incorrect. Starving an actress down would have been distracting. Viewers can’t get into the fantasy if they’re wondering if one of the servants has been replacing madame’s scone cream with non-dairy calorie-free whipped scone-style topping.

Pic: Splash