Kate Beckinsale doesn't take body shaming lying down.
The 47-year-old actress clapped back over the weekend at an Instagram commenter who said she looked “dreadfully thin” in a video of her lounging in bed.
Beckinsale then turned the tables on the commenter, noting the dark glasses covering his face in his profile photo.
“You’re wearing speedo goggles — it might be hard for you to be entirely confident about what you’re seeing — much less comment about it,” she responded, according to screenshots from the Instagram account Comments by Celebs.
Beckinsale has long been candid about dealing with body shaming — whether from social media trolls, film directors or the Daily Mail.
In 2016, she revealed that Michael Bay, her director on the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, had wanted her to lose weight for the role.
“He’d say, ‘Kate wasn’t so attractive that she would alienate the female audience,’ ” Beckinsale said, adding that he pushed her to lose weight for her role as a 1940s nurse, though she didn’t think it would fit the character. Bay later said that Beckinsale misunderstood him.
“I guess I was the ‘bad guy’ 16 years ago for suggesting a trainer because she just had her new beautiful baby girl — and she was about to enter into an intensive action movie. Note to reporters: 95 percent of leads in movies have trainers and drink green juice!” Bay responded.
Beckinsale spoke out a year later against the body shaming culture in Hollywood, from the obsession with pregnancy and post-baby bodies to the nude photo hacking scandal of in 2014.
“It’s mostly hitting females when they are objectively at their most powerful,” she says. “[When they’re] creating life, growing into themselves emotionally and intellectually, and the knee jerk rush to bully her body in pregnancy and afterwards, her age, her cellulite, hacking a phone for private photos and mocking her vagina, trickles down from the one shamed woman and leaks into our whole culture.”
Beckinsale had been calling out the Daily Mail after the outlet incorrectly said she was 11 years older than her actual age. The model urged other women to see that these insults are the result of “fear” of women.
“I urge us all, as females, to see it for what it is. Fear of YOU. Fear of the magical mystery shit a woman can do with her magical body. Fear of what she can withhold or bestow,” she said. “It’s the same impulse to reduce the power of a pretty girl who wouldn’t date you in school by becoming a big boss and getting your penis out at a meeting it made you feel powerful to set … It’s fear. Don’t let it in. Let’s see it as fear and try to mend it together, rationally and peacefully.”
Source: Read Full Article