Kerry Washington Recalls Feeling Pressured to Be as Thin as Gwyneth Paltrow in the ‘90s

The actress revealed in a discussion with Gabrielle Union that she was affected by body stereotypes during the 1990s.

Kerry Washington brought up her contemporaries Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow during a serious discussion about body image with Gabrielle Union. “These are stereotypes, but the ways that their moms and the women in that world looked was so different from the women that I grew up with,” Kerry told Gabrielle during the October 1 conversation, per PEOPLE. “And all the messages I was getting from Hollywood and from this environment was that thinner is better. And that success looked like thinness.”

She went on, adding that standards were different in the 1990s. “Jennifer’s butt was being celebrated everywhere,” she recalled. “But that wasn’t what I was interpreting as beautiful. Because I was spending nine hours a day at Spence, where Gwyneth Paltrow went. I’m not body shaming Gwyneth Paltrow, but…there was one area that I was sort of being told was the direction to pursue.”

The discussion then turned to how those expectations can lead to disordered behaviors. “I think that we sometimes don’t talk about it as much as we should,” she went on. “Part of why I think it’s important to talk about it is because disordered eating does not belong to one community. That pain does not belong to one community.”

And, she said elsewhere in the conversation, it starts early. “I think this idea of needing to fix myself, needing to be better, needing to be more perfect, those seeds were planted very early,” she divulged. The discussion came about as the actress was promoting her memoir, Thicker Than Water.

In a September interview, the Scandal beauty delved deeper into her past history with eating disorders. “I knew how to manage. I was so high-functioning and the food took me out” she said, per ETOnline. “Like, the body dysmorphia, the body hatred, it was beyond my control. And really led me to feeling like I need help from somebody or something bigger than me or I am in trouble. Because I don’t know how to live with this and I could feel how the abuse was a way to hurt myself, as if I didn’t want to really be here and it scared me that I could not want to be here, because I was in so much pain.”