A Miscarriage Helped Melanie Lynskey Accept Her Body
The Yellowjackets star has been a refreshingly honest and outspoken about body size and body acceptance.
It took a pregnancy loss for Melanie Lynskey to reach a place of acceptance after struggling with body image for years.
The Yellowjackets star, 45, recently opened up to theSkimm’ about how her career impacted her view of herself, admitting that it wasn’t until recently that she felt confident and secure in her own body. Lynskey said she’s fought against “the shape that my body’s supposed to be” for a long time.
“It’s hard to be a size 10 next to a size 0,” she told theSkimm’. “I spent many years not really eating and being very worried about what I looked like.”
She continued, “A couple of years ago I had a miscarriage and I just didn’t really recover from it physically and having a very young daughter made me really think about, ‘OK, I need to be kinder to myself and accepting and saying sorry to my body for what it just went through.’ And giving my daughter a positive example of what it looks like to have a mother who just is accepting of her body.”
Lynskey recently called out body shamers who felt the need to comment on her appearance following the premiere of Yellowjackets. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she even said her co-stars defended her after she was pressured by a production member to lose weight before filming. Juliette Lewis wrote a letter to producers about the incident, which sparked Lynskey to fight for change in the industry.
“I did find it important that this character [Shauna] is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about it, because I want women to be able to to watch it and be like, ‘Wow, she looks like me and nobody’s saying she’s the fat one.’ That representation is important,” she told Rolling Stone.
Lynskey reiterated that point to theSkimm’, saying, “I think it’s just good for women to get to see different shapes and sizes. I want to be representative of what a lot of women in the world look like.”
The New Zealand actor has been having a moment with the success of Yellowjackets, which won her a Critics Choice Award, as well as the Hulu’s miniseries Candy — which both discuss, in part, the intricacies of motherhood.
“When someone wants something from you all the time… it’s very, very hard to center yourself and be like, ‘What do I even want? What’s going to make me feel good?'” Lynskey, who shares a daughter with husband Jason Ritter, told SheKnows. “That’s, for I think a lot of women, the hardest thing. You can’t even answer that question for yourself at a certain point because your mind is just so attuned to everybody else’s needs. And it’s beautiful, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life… It changes everything.”
