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Jonah Hill Talks About Learning to Love Himself After Struggling With His Weight: I’m ‘Under Construction’

Jonah Hill
Jonah HillKevin Mazur/Getty Images

Growing in self-love. Jonah Hill opened up about learning to accept himself amid his fluctuating weight over the years.

Related: Jonah Hill Shows Off Dramatic Weight Loss

“I think everybody has a version of themselves — I call it, like, a snapshot, let’s say, at some point in your life, of the person you are,” Hill, 34, said during his Friday, October 19, appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “You’re trying to kind of hide from the world or makes you feel a certain way, and even if you get success or you grow up or you become good-looking or whatever, the things that you think will fix the thing you kind of carry some part of that with you. So for me, it’s definitely being, like, this 14-year-old kid, being overweight, wanting to fit in with these skaters and hip-hop kids and just feeling lonely and maybe not understanding my own worth.”

Related: Celebrities’ Weight Loss and Transformations

Jonah Hill
Jonah Hill Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

The Maniac star explained how his appearance affected the way people perceived him: “I came up in goofy comedies and this kind of like curly-haired, overweight kid, and everyone had their own opinion on what I should be, how they could speak to me, how they could treat me.”

Related: Best Celebrity Workout Tips

Hill highlights his struggles with self-image further in his Inner Children magazine, which he read aloud on the talk show. “I became famous in my late teens and then spent most of my young adult life listening to people say that I was fat and gross and unattractive, and it’s only in the last four years writing and directing my movie Mid90s that I’ve started to understand how much that hurt and got into my head,” he writes.

The director then dropped this knowledge on Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m under construction like we all are, you know what I mean? We’re all just trying to figure it out.”

Hill first showed off his slimmed down figure in 2011, but he gained 40 lbs for his role in 2015’s War Dogs. The Wolf of Wall Street actor later relied on a nutritionist and his 21 Jump Street costar Channing Tatum to lose the weight.

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