I had people body-shaming me when I gained a lot of weight and as a teenager, your body is going to change. To get through it, you need to have great family and friends.
I didn't think I was fat. I just thought I didn't need to gain any weight. But I would drop weight and then I would be comfortable with that number. Then I would lose more weight and that would become my new number.
Why not have a motivation beyond me to get to a healthy weight? Every actor does that. We're chameleons. We change; we grow as an actor. You lose weight, you gain weight, you change your hair or whatever.
For me, addiction comes down to basically where a pattern of behaviour has developed and that pattern of behaviour is becoming a very damaging cycle. It's sort of damaging your relationships, friends or lovers, it's damaging your own personal health and it's damaging for you and your workplace.
If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.
Self-deceit is a most damaging trait. The remedy, for an artist, is to paint a self-portrait!
A 20-pound weight on the back of a small horse is more damaging than a 20-pound weight on a very big horse.
Shaming people into being virtuous doesn't change behaviour.
I think between 2014 and 2015, I made weight five times in 11 months. During that time, I felt my body change. It was able to hold on to more weight. And anybody who makes weight knows that it gets harder and harder to make weight once you've done it that many times.
I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
One of the issues I think is very important, in many communities of color, there's a stigma about mental health. We find that the shaming that comes from acknowledging that one may have some issues that may relate to mental health, often people are not willing to go and seek additional help because of that shaming or that cultural stigma that's associated with it. And I think that we need to make this change in how people approach mental health.
People have got to stop fat-shaming and writing bad stuff. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be around for a long time. Get over the weight thing and look at yourself.
To the image of the characters, I do change my appearance. For example, I gain weight and I lose weight sometimes, and I grow my hair and cut it. Acting is all about physical expression, so I need to change my appearance for all the characters.
We're always too skinny, or too fat. Too tall, or too short. We're shaming each other, and we're shaming ourselves, and it sucks.
You have to be an ally in a difficult time and not turn on yourself with self-shaming thoughts, which makes facing pain intolerable.
The bigger you become of a celebrity, the bigger the expectations, the pressure on you - to make change, to say what people want, to target the people they want to target. Fame is toxic; it is quite toxic.