Maggie Gyllenhaal has now embraced her body, but she hasn’t always found it easy to be so accepting.
“I think when I was younger, my goal was to be as thin as possible, and that was the ideal. But I wasn’t ever able to get so far over there,” Gyllenhaal, 46, said on a recent episode of “The Longevity Game” podcast. “But I still think that was the goal for a long time. I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice all that much, I think, and thank goodness for that.”
In the early days of Gyllenhaal’s Hollywood career, she said she was told by two different directors to lose 10 pounds.
“When I first started auditioning and acting and stuff, it was a time when you could say all sorts of crazy things to actresses,” she said. “I’ve always been pretty thin … it’s a f–ked up thing to say to somebody, OK?”
Gyllenhaal continued, “It only occurred to me just now that two different directors said that to me. I think that both of them said it as a kind of manipulation. They were trying to make me feel something, which they managed to do. But still, like, that’s crazy.”
She added that she was constantly being told she wasn’t “pretty enough” or “sexy enough,” saying with a laugh, “I would, like, wear something I thought was sexy and go to an audition and then get that note.”
Gyllenhaal noted that the comments “did hurt” and it “didn’t completely go away” as she still can recall their remarks.
“I think my response at the time was just to, like, be really fierce, you know, like, ‘F–k that,’ or whatever, in order to get through it,” she said. “And then how much of that was put on, I mean some of it was certainly put on.”
Now, years later, Gyllenhaal said she’s become more accepting of her body.
“The older I get, the gentler I am on myself. I mean, I find, only recently really, sometimes I’ll look at myself and my body and I’ll be like, ‘I look good, it’s OK, I look fine,’” she said.
She continued, “I’m not going ‘Oh my god, what is this?’ I mean, sometimes I do, yeah, sometimes I do. I also now have these, like, moments of the clouds clearing where I’m like ‘I look good. I look fine. I’m happy with this.’”
