Pitch Perfect star Rebel Wilson reveals that her contract for the hit 2012 movie prevented her from losing any weight. The hit musical stars Anna Kendrick as Beca, a freshman who joins her university’s all-girls singing group, The Bellas. Wilson costars in the movie as a character named Fat Amy, who would also appear in Pitch Perfect 2 in 2015 and Pitch Perfect 3 in 2017.
In a recent interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Wilson reveals that her contract prevented her weight from fluctuating throughout the duration of the Pitch Perfect franchise.
The actor, who revealed last year that she lost almost 80 pounds, explains that, while she loved her time playing the role of Fat Amy and others like it, she was interested in getting healthier and avoiding being “pigeonholed” into certain types of characters. Check out Wilson’s full comment below on her decision to lose weight:
“I did wait until ‘Pitch Perfect’ seemed like it was over. I couldn’t lose a massive amount of weight because it was in the contracts for that movie. You can’t lose — I think it’s not more than 10 pounds or gain more than 10 pounds. You have to kind of stay at the weight. It’s in your contract.
“I was thinking for awhile that I’d like get healthier. I was stereotyped in playing that fat, funny friend, which is so hard because I love those roles. I love doing the roles, I love those characters. But then I did want to do more things, but I felt like being the bigger girl, you’re just more pigeonholed.”
Hollywood’s Obsession With Female Actors’ Weights
As has been the case for decades, Hollywood still upholds certain unrealistic beauty standards for female actors. There have been numerous instances even in recent years of female stars being asked to lose weight for leading roles. Bryce Dallas Howard, for example, revealed last year that she was pressured to lose weight for Jurassic World Dominion and that this wasn’t exactly a novel experience for her, hinting that similar requests had been made in the past.
Similarly, Jennifer Lawrence shared last year that she was asked to lose weight prior to landing her role in The Hunger Games franchise in 2012. Again, Lawrence clarified in her comment that this wasn’t the first time she had experienced a request of this nature. That star went on to explain that, ultimately, she opted against losing any weight because of the impact it could have on her younger fans and their own body images.
Howard and Lawrence were able to use their power as actors to deny requests to lose weight, but the fact that they were asked at all signifies that Hollywood still has a long way to go when it comes to the ways in which it treats female actors and their bodies. In the same way that Howard and Lawrence were pressured to conform to unrealistic body standards in order to play female lead characters, Wilson’s weight was evidently part of what executives thought made her Pitch Perfect character a funny supporting player, instead of the personality beneath it.
Source: Call Her Daddy