“This is what I have to explain to my kids,” says “The Girl Next Door” star
Elisha Cuthbert is opening up about what it was like being an “it” girl in the aughts.
During an appearance on the “Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson” podcast, the 39-year-old recalled how she was encouraged by studio executives to shoot with men’s magazines like Maxim and FHM that were known to over-sexualize young women.
“There was really no option back then,” “The Girl Next Door” said on the pod and explained it was what the film studios “wanted you to do.”
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“It’s not like I won an Olympic medal. It was just some list some random magazine decided to create,” she said. “When someone reads my bio, those things come up. They actually don’t mean anything in regards to me as a person or my career.”
She also noted that most female stars at the time were doing it and it was a part of the culture in Hollywood.
“We kinda ended up in a space at the time where that was really happening. I mean, Halle Berry was doing it, for God’s sake … Jennifer Aniston was doing it,” she continued. “We were probably too young to be subjected to that, and feeling pressured to do that.”
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“This is what I have to explain to my kids,” Cuthbert said, acknowledging the internet has immortalized her photoshoots from that decade. “This weird, bizarre outfit and hair extensions. And you know what’s so crazy? I don’t even know how much of those pictures are even accurate as far as, like, airbrushing … I was in my early 20s. I didn’t look bad, but did I look that? I don’t even know if the fantasy’s real.”
Elisha shares four-year-old Zaphire and six-month-old Fable with her husband Dion Phaneuf.
“If I can take what I know now about having two children, and going back, I would be so much kinder to myself,” she shared. “Luckily, I didn’t have any eating issues or anything like that, but I definitely got caught up in that wanting to live up to what everyone was expecting of us, which is [to be] the ‘hottest woman in the world.’ It’s like what? I’m an actress. I’m not Gisele [Bündchen], what in the world? I’m 5’2″ with little legs and height. It was kind of ridiculous.”
She concluded, “I feel like there’s better ways to filter that those times of the FHMs … that was so crazy … Living up to these ridiculous standards, it’s just not reality.”
