When “Yellowjackets” (a series about a high-school-girls soccer team forced to survive in the wilderness after a plane crash) premiered, it set the internet atwitter with comparisons to Lord of the Flies and freaked out ruminations about what you might do in the same dire straits. It also unleashed a wave of body shaming for actor Melanie Lynskey.
Lynskey, who plays Shauna, responded to a tweet by writer and body image activist Ashley C. Ford about the body shaming she’d experienced from fans of the show since Yellowjackets aired. “Most egregious are the ‘I care about her health!!’ people,” she wrote. “Bitch you don’t see me on my Peloton! You don’t see me running through the park with my child. Skinny does not always equal healthy.”
This isn’t the first time Lynskey has experienced body shaming in connection with the show. Earlier this month, she shared in an interview with Rolling Stone that she also experienced body shaming on set when a member of the production team reportedly implied she needed to lose weight for the role. “They were asking me, ‘What do you plan to do? I’m sure the producers will get you a trainer. They’d love to help you with this,’” she said, per People.
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Lynskey deliberately wanted to protect her character from that mindset, she said. “I did find it important that this character is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about it, because I want women to be able to to watch it and be like, ‘Wow, she looks like me and nobody’s saying she’s the fat one,’” she told Rolling Stone. “That representation is important.”
On set, Lynskey’s costars Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis came to her defense, and Lewis reportedly wrote a letter to the producers, per People.
Lynskey has spoken in the past about her struggle with body image. “I was very unwell for a long time,” she told People in 2016. “I had eating issues and at a certain point I was like, ‘I’m not going to survive’—not like I was on death’s door or anything, but I was so unhappy and my hair was falling out.” Ultimately, she worked on addressing the pressure to conform to unrealistic ideals and believe that people would hire her just the way she was: “I did have to truly become comfortable with myself, because you can’t fake it.”
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Source: SELF
