Smiling is not her favorite. Uma Thurman revealed in a recent interview that she was traumatized about her physical appearance after a childhood incident involving her pearly whites.
“I’m enjoying getting older,” Thurman, 44, recently told Hello! (via the Daily Mail). “Because I feel I didn’t appreciate being pretty when I was younger. I felt terrible.”
Thurman’s surprising confession was accompanied by an anecdote that explains why the star has perfected the slight, red carpet smize.
“When I was 10, someone told me I had an ugly smile,” Thurman recalled. “So I spent the whole of my younger years feeling embarrassed and never smiling with my mouth open. But what are you going to do?”
These days, the Kill Bill actress has been trying to embrace her age. “We all lose our looks as we get older and I actually think there’s a beauty to older people that’s just different to the beauty of younger people,” she reflected. “You look good as a beautiful mature woman, but you do not look 12… If you tried you would look really weird.”
Thurman’s comments come one month after she hijacked headlines after debuting a dramatically different look on the red carpet (as seen above). While the Internet speculated that Ethan Hawke‘s ex-wife had plastic surgery, a source confirmed to Us Weekly that Thurman’s transformation came from her makeup artist’s brush strokes.
“It was a fun makeup choice,” the insider told Us of Thurman’s mascara-free eyes. “Something totally different, that’s all.”
Thurman also joked about the hoopla on the Today show, telling Savannah Guthrie: ” I know I look weird! I don’t know, I guess nobody liked my makeup.”
She also noted: “I’ve been doing this for years and years and years — people say things nice and they say things mean and it’s like whatever. You take the good with the bad.”