12 celebrities who’ve been told they’re too fat for roles

Despite being only a size 2, Ashley Benson was turned down for a part due to allegedly being too fat. She told Health she cried for half an hour after receiving the bad news.

The lovely Mindy Kaling was once offered a sketch comedy based on her own life, but was forced to try out for the role. She told The Guardian that she was then rejected, ostensibly due to her size.

Winslet recently told The Guardian that as a teen, she was advised to “settle for fat-girl parts.” She got the last laugh, however, when she made a name for herself alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

Today, she’s the gorgeous and terrifying Ellaria Sand on Game of Thrones, but first, Indira Varma was a struggling young actress with a belly that allegedly wobbled too much when she ran. She shared this revelation with The Evening Standard in 2006.

Once referred to as a “female hippo” by a film critic, Melissa McCarthy has since embraced her figure. She believes that nobody is perfect and that it’s natural for her weight to go up or down from time to time.

When she was very young, television executives pressured Raven-Symoné about her weight. She confessed to Oprah that she eventually got “tired and irritated” and dropped a few pounds just to shut people up.

Like many curvy actresses, Christina Hendricks struggled in the early days of her career. She explained to Flare that she couldn’t land film roles because of her figure and instead only booked small roles in commercials. Fortunately, Mad Men changed all that, and now, Hendricks is a superstar.

Attacked for having a “womanly” body, Jennifer Lawrence confessed in a Harper’s Bazaar interview that she was told to lose weight or risk being fired. She was also forced to look at nearly nude photos of herself in hopes that these images would convince her to lose weight.

While filming the MTV series This is How I Made It, Amber Riley admitted that she was rejected again and again due to her weight after St. Sass was released. Thankfully, she was able to land the role on Glee that made her a household name.

According to MTV, when she was first getting started in showbiz, Jennifer Aniston was told that she’d never make it unless she lost 30 pounds. She took that advice, but later admitted that she spent way too much time beating herself up over her figure.

Most of the weight-loss pressure Maxine Peake experienced came from fellow Dinnerladies star Victoria Wood, as she revealed during an appearance on the Graham Norton Show. After being badmouthed, Peake lost weight so quickly that she had to wear a fat suit while filming Dinnerladies.

Weight was just one item on a long list of things Kat Dennings was told to fix to land a role. She was also allegedly too pale and her teeth supposedly weren’t straight enough. Fortunately, she had a bit of an attitude, and she told The New York Times that the rejections didn’t really faze her.