Former model and reality TV star Adrianne Curry likely doesn’t smize when she thinks back on her days in the limelight.
The first winner of “America’s Next Top Model” — who now lives a quiet life in Montana — told People in an interview published Tuesday that she decided to flee Hollywood after she received an offer that would have helped her financially but compromised her values.
“I felt that I was on a cusp,” Curry told the magazine of her mental state at the time. “I was 32 years old and I got offered a job for face fillers, and it was a huge payday with free face fillers and one up to my contract and all this stuff. And I remember sitting there, and that money was so good that I considered it. Then I thought, ‘I am willing to deface, to mutilate myself for money?’”
“I had to really start to question like, ‘Okay, where is this path going to take me if even for a second I considered injecting something in my face for a payday?’” she continued. “At 32 years old, you don’t need that.”
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The decision to get a cosmetic procedure is entirely up to an individual — and such procedures are far more prevalent now than in the early 2010s.
But when Curry was offered the job, the former “Surreal Life” star said, she didn’t like who she was becoming from focusing so much on her appearance.
She told People that being in front of a camera so often brought out “narcissistic traits” she wasn’t proud of — and she feared who she’d become if she continued down that career path.
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“I saw a future on ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ with my face full of filler and me clinging to youth that is gone,” she said.
“So I left and I make a hell of a lot less money, but I feel like I have my dignity, my soul,” she said. “I felt like from when I won ‘Top Model’ to that point that a lot of me had been chipped away. And it’s like every year you chip another piece off and you’re like, ‘Well, I won’t miss this little piece,’ just to keep it going.”
Although Curry said she didn’t want to be consumed by her own appearance, she apparently felt free to criticize another woman’s body last year.
While Melanie Lynskey was guest-starring on HBO’s smash hit “The Last of Us” as Kathleen — a vindictive character who heads a militaristic revolutionary movement — Curry took it upon herself to criticize Lynskey’s body and question why she was cast in that particular role.
Under a photo of Lynskey on X, formerly Twitter, Curry wrote: “her body says life of luxury…not post apocolyptic warlord. where is linda hamilton when you need her?”
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Lynskey quickly called out Curry for comparing her to Hamilton’s protagonist in “Terminator” by noting that her character in “The Last of Us” wasn’t meant to be buff, but a woman who had successfully executed a plan to overtake the government.
“I am supposed to be SMART, ma’m,” Lynskey tweeted alongside a screenshot of Curry’s remark. “I don’t need to be muscly. That’s what henchmen are for.”
Curry claimed in a follow-up tweet (that was later deleted) that Lynskey “cropped out what I said about her perfect hour glass frame being the most desirable to men,” and described the screenshot Lynskey shared as “manipulative.”
Curry also tweeted: “actors cant allow people to not like their characters? I am DONE.”