Showbiz certainly isn’t for the faint of heart, as Kat Dennings can attest to.
The Shifting Gears star opened up to People about the scrutiny she was put under for her appearance as she was starting out in the industry, explaining that “it was a very different environment than it is now.”
“There was not a lot of inclusivity at all,” she shared. “It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back.”
Dennings, who said that casting directors were “very cruel” — even with children — recalled her experiences auditioning at just 12 years old.
“I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like, ‘How’d it go?’ And they’d be like, ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat,’” she revealed.
Fortunately, Dennings had thick skin, acknowledging her “very strong” attitude and saying that such derogatory comments “didn’t break [her] spirit.”
“I was like, ‘I’ll show them,’” she added. “I guess props to my parents, because they were like, ‘They’re idiots. Don’t listen to them.’ And I was like, ‘They’re idiots, I’m not.’”
One of Dennings’ first gigs was in a 2000 episode of Sex and the City, in which she played a wealthy teen named Jenny Brier who enlists Samantha (Kim Cattrall) to plan her bat mitzvah. During an appearance on The View last week, Dennings, who “wasn’t allowed to watch” the HBO sitcom because she was only 14 at the time, explained that her family “didn’t have cable” either, so she “really had no idea what the show was.”
“I was like, ‘What a weird show. What a weird title,’” she remembered. “And then on the way home, on the train, we saw a building — like, a Sex and the City billboard across the whole building.”
Nonetheless, Dennings pointed out how times have changed in her interview with People, highlighting the “much softer, kinder” climate of the industry that’s thankfully different from the “very insane” one she grew up in.
As for other stars who have recently shared similar struggles, Sally Struthers claimed she was “totally fat-shamed” by Betty White, who she described as a “very passive-aggressive woman.”
