Why are fat suits like Sarah Paulson's so controversial?
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Is it worth the weight?
Sarah Paulson has said she regrets wearing a fat suit to portray the late Linda Tripp, the White House whistleblower in the upcoming FX series “Impeachment: American Crime Story.” In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Paulson, 46, said she wouldn’t “make the same choice going forward” and acknowledged that “fatphobia is real.”
But that hasn’t stopped critics from sounding off about the ways that fat suits — long used on film and television for demeaning visual gags — cause harm.
Abby Rose Morris, an actor in New York City who hosts the podcast “More Than Tracy Turnblad,” which focuses on fat representation in entertainment, agrees the Golden Globe winner shouldn’t have worn a fat suit, or even gained weight, to embody Tripp.
Rather, she said that Tripp should have been played by a fat actor. “Fat actors rarely get cast in roles,” Morris told The Post. “When we’re shut out of the roles intended to be fat the message is that fat actors don’t deserve to be seen.”
On the Twitterverse, the outcry was the same: directors should ditch fat suits, and hire actors who visually match the size of the character.
The controversy around these prosthetics isn’t new.
In 2002, writer Marisa Meltzer wrote a piece for Bitch magazine, asking “Are Fat Suits the New Blackface?” Her concern had to do with the fact that two-thirds of women in the US are plus-sized, yet non-waify women are rarely depicted on screen. When they are, it’s often by actresses who have deigned to gain weight to play a role — think Renée Zellweger, who famously added pounds to play the weight-obsessed Bridget Jones in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” in 2001, and for the subsequent sequels.
Yet despite the criticism, fat suits have been costume department mainstays, used to build up the size of slender actors, often in the name of humor. The most egregious examples include Fat Monica on “Friends” — considered by many fans to be a faux-pas, in retrospect — Fat Schmidt on “New Girl” and Rosemary in “Shallow Hal,” played by the otherwise sylph-like Gwyneth Paltrow. Comedians Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence have both donned fat suits for “Norbit” and “Big Momma’s House.”
Serious films have also seen their fair share of fat suits. Viola Davis recently donned one, on top of gaining weight, to play the role of 1920s singer Ma Rainey in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Christian Bale gained 43 pounds and wore a prosthetic to play Dick Cheney in “Vice” — he was also nominated for Best Actor for the role — and Gary Oldman won a statue for his role as Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” fat suit and all.
With that kind of track record, will fat suits ever be relegated to the back of the costume closet?
Morris is actually pretty optimistic about acting opportunities for heavier actors.
“While I can definitely see more situations like Paulson’s in the future, I hope that with more activism from fat folks in entertainment and the fat activist community at large … fat actors will be given more roles,” she said.
Paulson’s reaction to this latest controversy is also a win, she said.
“Her response has made me a lot more optimistic about the pull our community has and I know she will do better in the future,” she said. “While I don’t think the backlash against Paulson playing Tripp guarantees a response from people in power, it’s a great example of the ability we have to make change.”
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