Gender
Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts have donned 'fat suits' for recent film roles. But what do real overweight women think of their on-screen portrayal, asks Rachel Shabi
Fat is the new thin in Hollywood, albeit artificially. Gwyneth Paltrow, a woman who usually looks her eight stone, has recently been pictured wearing a "fat suit" and several pounds of face make-up to play what she describes as her most challenging role to date: a 22-stone woman in the forthcoming film, Shallow Hal. She follows in the temporarily heavy footsteps of Julia Roberts, who wore a fat suit to play an overweight version of herself in the current release, America's Sweethearts. Add Courtney Cox Arquette to the list, for wearing such a suit for the flashback, fat Monica scenes on the TV sitcom Friends, and a Hollywood preoccupation with bogus obesity begins to emerge.
In the past, fat suits have usually been worn by male actors needing to large-up, for example Martin Lawrence in Big Momma's House, Mike Myers in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Eddie Murphy as Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor. Movie technology and design advancements have made these giant, latex suits a convincing film device. Fat suits encase the actor in the required additional body bulk, while plaster prosthetics are glued on to the face in a marathon make up session.
Paltrow, in a recent interview for Elle magazine, describes the process: "They put straws in your nose so you can breathe, they wrap your hair, they basically bury you alive in this plaster stuff that hardens. It's very claustrophobic." Roberts, meanwhile, is reported to have joked to Oprah Winfrey that, when make-up artists offered to let her take a nap during the tedious bulking-up process for America's Sweethearts, she replied, "If I go to sleep and wake up 60 pounds heavier, I may never sleep again."
On first instinct, the fat suit seems a cop-out. Perhaps sad*stically, we prefer actresses to genuinely lard-up if the role requires it hence the comprehensive praise for Renée Zellweger who gained 17 pounds of honest fat to star in Bridget Jones's Diary (although admiration dissolved at the sight of Zellweger losing all the weight, and then some, within seconds of stepping off the film set). However, it seems that Paltrow and Roberts had legitimate reasons for using a fat suit. In both cases, the women were required to be overweight for only a fraction of their films, performing the remainder of the time as their usual slim selves. As Paltrow explains: "You know, it wasn't really practical to gain 250lb for 10 days of shooting." Medics agree that it is extraordinarily difficult - not to mention unhealthy - to gain such a large amount of body fat in a short period of time.
Since neither film intentionally ridicules obesity (although, arguably, the very fact of Roberts and Paltrow playing fat is a cheap joke), there may be no cause for concern. The message from WeightWatchers UK is that, if the character is sensitively played and not ridiculed purely because of their shape, then fatted-up celebrity roles are OK. Deborah Orr, 38, who used to weigh 23 stone, agrees. "I have got a very good sense of humour, but I did find the fat Monica scenes in Friends offensive," she says. As for Paltrow and Roberts, "if the role they are playing is a real character and dealt with as a human being, I don't find that offensive at all."
A fat suit is perhaps no different to any other prop used to get into character: wigs, made-up wrinkles, false teeth and false handicaps all fit into the same category. Although in a more rational world it would be considered a better idea to simply select an appropriately sized actress to play a "large" character, the mechanics of the box-office lend these instances of falsely fat, big-name celebrities a certain inevitability.
What could be considered offensive, however, is Paltrow describing the experience as something of a fat epiphany. "It was unbelievable," she says, describing walking around a New York hotel lobby, for practice, in her fat suit. "People don't make eye contact. It was like people sense there's something wrong with you - like when you see someone come in who's missing a limb or something, and you think, 'I'm not going to look, because then they'll think that I'm looking at their abnormality.' But to the person who has that abnormality, it feels so totally isolating and horrible. It was really devastating." Having walked in the shoes of obesity, she says she now understands how it feels to be fat.
Which is "total crap", according to Victoria Durrant, 29, who used to weigh 17 stone. "When you are big, you are invisible," she says. "Unless you have been that fat person who takes the back route to work and stays home at weekends, turning into a hermit because you don't want people to see the size you are, you cannot begin to imagine how that feels."
Paltrow seems to have missed the obvious point that her fat came off at the end of the day. "It took two years of dedication and hard work to lose 13 stone," says Orr. She adds that while fat-suited actresses may have gleaned a slight glimpse of the physical limitations of being overweight, "there is no way they could have perceived the emotional weight, the indignity, how it affects your self-esteem, self-confidence, personal relationships, everything."
Meanwhile, Dr John Wilding, who treats obesity at University Hospital, Aintree, is concerned that the fat suit trivialises obesity. "It would give a very superficial idea of some of the problems associated with obesity," he says, "and ignores the medical problems, such as what it's like to get diabetes, heart attacks, pain in your knees, shortness of breath and soreness from skin folds in uncomfortable and embarrassing places."
But the fat-suit phenomenon is not completely uninformed. Psychologists who work with the clinically obese say that donning a fat suit can foster an awareness of the physical limitations of being excessively overweight: the difficulties inherent, for instance, in tackling public transport, clothes or shoelaces. Andrew Hill, a psychologist specialising in shape and weight concerns at Leeds University school of medicine, likens the fat-suit experience to that of medical students wearing vision-impairment glasses or sitting in wheelchairs to better understand sight and physical disabilities.
'It is not demeaning," he says, "if it helps an actress articulate what it's like to live in a stigmatised state of body and negotiate an environment designed for people without these differences." Given that, according to clinical psychologist Dr Lih-Mei Liao, "fat people are not political, and are very accepting of other people's denigration of fatness", it could almost be considered a public awareness requirement for "normal"-bodied people to live in a fat suit for a day. Such an experience may encourage us to think about creating more appropriate services for obesity and an environment that is more reflective of the fact that half the population in Britain is overweight. And such a course of action would, naturally, be easier than trying to comprehend why western society is so alarmingly fat-inducing in the first place.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK%2Bfp7mle5FpZ2pnnqTDcH6RaJ6eppSav2%2FByg%3D%3D
