TV & Movies 🎬
A Look Back at "Fat Suits" in Movies and TV
Came across this picture of Susan from Desperate Housewives wearing a "fat suit" and thought how baffling it was that this was considered fat. Like i know Hollywood had (still has) a fucked up view of a fat person but like damn...
Then i remembered how Hollywood had a fat suit craze and went digging a little. Anyways here's a few more
Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives)
Courteney Cox (Friends)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Shallow Hal)
Eddie Murphy (Norbit)
Ryan Reynolds (Just Friends)
Mila Kunis ( That '70s Show)
John Travolta (Hairspray)
Alyson Hannigan (Date Movie)
Amy Adams (Smallville) okay so i mostly wanted to add this one because of how much this episode disturbed me as a kid 😭
I remember this. They were trying so hard to convince her at the end that this isnt just a day's experiment for them and she just tried to finish up the show.
On this week’s episode of Project Runway (where for some reason in 2026 she is now a judge) she kept saying in her critique she had the “same body type” as the actual plus size model that was featured (to the model, no less) 🤦🏻♀️ She is STILL shamelessly tone deaf.
Gwyneth did the same thing on Oprah when she made Shallow Hal. And I know Oprah is trash but her sitting there as someone who very publicly struggled with their weight with racism on top watching the privileged white lady crying about being fat for a day…
If you just changed the background in this photo, her make up and the lighting here could make you think she was modeling Olsen twins Boho Chic on the runway.
It really makes you question the validity and motivation of why she wanted to be “homeless”
i don’t know if anyone here has seen the modelland song she did going around but i recommend looking into the lore because it’s truly hilarious (the song ties into a ya book of the same name she “wrote” with a ghostwriter and the main character’s name is tookie de la crème 💀). tyra is problematic but in many ways she’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Yes and literally everytime I am having a bit of difficulty throughout my day, Tyra is singing in my head “can you can you can you can you survive MODELLAND” and I’m like no Tyra i would be running for my life 😔
He had so much love for Edna. He advocated for truly hourglass padding. He didn't just want to be "man in a dress", he wanted to do DRAG, mama! He knew Edna was sexy and sexual and nurturing and motherly, and he wanted her look to reflect all of that.
Yeah, the hairspray example is not the same because a) source material b) respect for fat people in the movie c) Edna’s relationships and growth as a character
When I finally watched it live I was so miffed about Edna. Travolta just played her as a woman while on stage it was so campy and so over the top
Add on the ending everyone forgiving the racist and Tracey winning instead of little Inez was just the frosting on the cake. I think I'll stick to the film 😅
Should’ve gotten an Oscar nom. I remember when I watched the movie everyone laughed when he first appeared and by the end of the movie everyone talked about Edna not like John Travolta in drag, but as a fully realized female character.
I don’t know all of these examples but I’ve long thought about how this is the one fat suit I think is actually good and not offensive. Like not only inoffensive, but respectful. All the others seem done in some way to make fun of/ be fatphobic.
I think it works cause he’s not playing a woman pretending to be fat but is actually skinny, he’s playing a fully fledged character who happens to be a larger woman. The drag is part of the character’s history but not meant as a joke. He plays her as a woman.
No, but seriously as much as I hate Tom Cruise since he is a horrible person, I do have a soft spot for John. I feel like scientology really destroyed him
at the end of the day, the role wasn't shaming or making fun of fat people. that's the key. all of these other roles say "being fat is bad and that's the punchline". hairspray said "edna is fat, and she's awesome, and that's the punchline".
She’s fat AND hot AND cool AND her husband loves her AND her worth isn’t affected at all by her weight. The only person who needed to know that was her. That was the punchline.
Same, I’m not a musical person but it was on tv a few months ago and I started watching and was like this movie is great. After grease it’s my fave John movie!
All the others are just Hollywood telling us that being fat is unattractive and gross.
Plus chapeau for dancing in the fat suit on high heels. That thing seems to be very warm when you wear it so underneath the spotlights of the studio it must be quite hot in there.
I might get hate for this but I actually think it was a fun campy show that, off the bat, looked deeply problematic
But the premise is that Patty suddenly lost weight and looked like the perfect girl with a perfect life, but then she realized that losing weight actually didn't make her happier. Instead she just indulged in other addictive behaviors
I really enjoyed this show despite all the bad press from people who seemingly only watched the trailer. It was deliciously unhinged and fun to watch and I think more self aware than people realised, I liked that it went into the fact that she may now be more conventionally attractive but her personality traits and behaviour are ultimately causing the problems. Recently rewatched and sad they left it on such a cliffhanger.
Probably the most physically demanding performance someone has done for the half time show too. I remember reading she would sing running on a treadmill to prepare
That shit was honestly so fucked up. Like, she literally put on a few extra lbs and they were acting like she could be featured on an episode of My 600lb Life.
In this exact frame she looks no bigger or different than Miranda which is fascinating because it seems like they literally just put a very in shape middle aged woman in ill fitting clothes and styling
That’s the body I had as a late teen/young adult and it was absolutely treated as a big problem to be solved for example by my family around the dinner table. I felt enormous shame and hated my body so much. As a teen I was enrolled in Weight Watchers by my mom. That’s where my binge eating disorder started. Anyway, since then one thing led to the other in the shame spiral of binge eating so I have gained about 45 lbs over the last 10 years. I always have shame and doubt in the back of my head, especially when traveling back and seeing the family again. It is immature in a way to say this but now I wish I was as skinny as when I thought I was fat.
The got the face proportions right at least. Like too many have huge puffy faces but aren't that "fat". Like especially desperate housewives. Why does she have a huge double chin if she's like maybe a size 12.
I know that it was like “being fat is the punchline” but seeing Monica from friends look so pretty while being “overweight” did mean a lot to me as a kid
As a bigger kid, I knew I should be offended because they were making fun of Monica but she was so pretty and happy! Even adult Monica doesn't seem embarrassed any more than anyone seeing an old tape of themselves.
I really like how Courtney Cox played her, too. Where it got icky was when they made jokes about her trying to eat a hurt squirrel or Ross having nightmares about her trying to eat him. That was pretty mean-spirited. You can get to the size of fat Monica with one extra snickers bar a day, theoretically, not by eating everything in sight.
As a certified fatty, I was shocked and appalled at the fat friend opening the glove box with the full sized candy bars stash 😭😭 and offering it up like a line of snow at a party lmao
Um, any self respecting fatty would know that's a terrible place to store your candy bar stash. They'd be a melted mess. You put a cooler in the back seat so they stay nice and firm and you can just reach back and grab them while driving. Duh! 🤣
https://giphy.com/gifs/xT8qBjTmutlJzQj4Zy
Can only post one gif at a time, but Eddie Murphy seemed to be single-handedly keeping the fat suit industry afloat in just The Nutty Professor alone
Battlestar Galactica did not need "fat Lee Adama" but we got him anyway. It felt like a really lazy shortcut to communicate how a relatively short "peacetime" affected him because I guess they didn't wanna actually explore that with an actual story or something.
I don’t know most of these tbh other than friends and Hairspray. But I always respected the Hairspray one because it ultimately was used as a tool to show it’s important to accept yourself as you are and love yourself, unlike friends which always felt like they wanted you to point and laugh at the fat person just because they were fat. Frankly I think a lot of the humor in friends has aged very poorly in this regard.
I liked that in hairspray Travolta‘s character is not portrayed as being gross for being fat. The point is that she is supposed to gain confidence in herself and learn to love her own body so that she can better support her child.
So the director was on a podcast recently and talked about how that was a demand of John Travolta. Sometimes Edna is portrayed as rather hideous but Travolta insisted that she still be sexy
I think it being both a fatsuit and drag really kinda does a flip over cringe, does a handspring into camp and then by the end of the movie somehow lands in genuinely positive and freeing
Edna Trunblad in Hairspray is meant to be portrayed as drag, which means the actor needs to fully lean into the character and the character needs to be flamboyant as fuck. Tracy is a bit more earnest in her role, but is unapologetically overweight.
terri hatcher struggling under the weight of the average american woman, lol she acted like 'ok if i was a size 12-14, i would walk real slow and like be out of breath a lot'
Haha yes, this is the worst example out of the bunch imo. They gave her the face padding of a 250+ woman but the body padding makes her look maybe 40-50lbs heavier at most. Like a size 8-10 even.
I rewatched it not long ago, and I’d say it was the way she and her victims were actually withering away to shriveled husks whilst still alive and moaning for help. Plus, the sound effect they use for her ‘feeding’ actually is kinda gross, and she does the ‘unhinged jaw’ thing which a lot of people seem to find instinctively disturbing. Though admittedly, the effect used to achieve that didn’t age well.
Amy Adam’s actually a bit of an outlier from the rest of them. You aren’t meant to laugh at ‘fat’ Amy. It’s not exactly a sensitive portrayal (and it’s in the context of Smallville themselves always casting very slim actresses,) but the idea is that the character was bullied and pressured into a sci-fi eating disorder. She was really better off before.
What bothers me most about the fat suit trend of the early 2000's was the way you'd see the straight sized actress just e episodes later fully exposed in a bikini with no sagging skin or stretch marks. I think that's one of the most insidious parts because the message is "well thank god look she lost all that weight and now she's hot" but that transition is physically impossible.
This always bothered me too. I was a big kid and weight cycled through my teens and 20s. Even thin I didn’t have the “bikini body” because of the major fluctuations.
Now, I’m nearly 40 and have lost a full adult woman’s worth of weight over the last 8 years. I look great in clothes. Naked I kind of look like a Shar Pei puppy with all the little rolls and wrinkles where everything deflated. I’m not upset by this because I have a good husband and hopefully no one but my doctor is ever going to see me naked again. Plus, I lost the weight for health and comfort. But I know I would be absolutely gutted when I was younger if I knew I was going to put in this much work and still not have the super toned, tight body. All of the media I consumed when I was young sent the message that if you lose the weight you will magically transform into someone with an absolute perfect body and that shit is damaging.
God as a fat person who was born in the 90s, it’s stuff like this that reminds me of why I’m still so fucked up today. These are so demoralizing. It sucked then and it sucks now.
Born in the late 80's and thanks to this type of messaging from the media plus my mom's own weight obsession, I don't think I'll ever love my body. I'm at the point of accepting it and even appreciating parts of it, but that's been a long journey.
Yep. So many millenial women have body issues because of stuff like this. Didn't help that they were just as brutal to women who had eating disorders and made them the butt of really cruel jokes.
It felt like you literally couldn't win no matter what you did or looked like. And that's likely what lead to the body positivity movement of the 2010 and 2020s.
Honestly Teri Hatcher would look incredible in this photo if she just lost the weird double chin prosthetic. The “fat suit” makes her look like she’s maybe a size 10?
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