ShortcutsGwyneth PaltrowThe actor said wearing a fat suit for the 2001 movie taught her what it is like to be humiliated as an obese person. Why are TV and film characters so rarely treated with dignity and respect?
‘Disaster” is how Gwyneth Paltrow has summed up her role in the 2001 film Shallow Hal, which will surprise few people who have actually seen it. Jack Black plays Hal, a man so shallow he has to be hypnotised in order to date a fat woman, who, through his boggled eyes, he sees as a very thin woman.
The nastiness of Shallow Hal, which has long appalled critics and fans alike, was front and centre in the trailer, where Hal’s friend attempts to “rescue” him from speaking to a fat woman, Rosemary, who is, in fact, willowy Paltrow dressed in a fat suit. But because he cannot see what she looks like, he falls for her “inner beauty”. It is an uncomfortable mix – a film that pretends to preach body acceptance while simultaneously inviting laughter at bodies that don’t fit into jeans size six and under. Take the scene where she is called a “rhino”, or the one where she cannonballs into a swimming pool causing a tidal wave. The message built into the script’s DNA is simple: fat is funny; it is OK to laugh at fat people.
This, Paltrow says now, was not clear to her until she had to live like a fat woman. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand and I walked through the lobby. It was so sad. It was so disturbing. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese. I felt humiliated.”
Fat characters rarely show up on TV and film, and when they do, they are hardly ever presented as people who deserve to be treated with dignity or respect. Despite public outcry over shows such as Insatiable – in which a formerly overweight teenager seeks revenge on the bullies who fat-shamed her while simultaneously being turned into a beauty pageant queen – and despite huge milestones being made with social media body-positivity trends, mainstream entertainment is yet to do much better. Toxic comments about people’s weight are abundant: Instagrammer Wendy Cheng felt comfortable enough recently to publicly criticise the model La’Shaunae Steward for her size, writing on her platform: “The morbidly obese should never have been seen as attractive.”
For the people who are targets, jokes at their expense are like wounds – or as the singer and rapper Lizzo has put it: “Like a little mosquito bite. You don’t even know it’s there. But soon, you look up, you’re covered in mosquito bites.”
As Paltrow has realised, even seemingly good-natured fat jokes are no shallow or insignificant thing. They hurt people, and then as now, need deeper reflection from those who choose to tell them.
This article was amended on 3 March 2020 to change a photograph. The original picture was captioned as showing Gwyneth Paltrow as Rosemary in Shallow Hal, but in fact showed Jill Christine Fitzgerald as Mrs Shanahan, Rosemary’s mother.
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