Actress says she’s also very much against airbrushing

Aug 2, 2010 19:41 GMT  ·  By

British actress Emily Blunt knows that a great part of her job is to always look good for the cameras, but there’s a limit beyond which she wouldn’t go to achieve this. Speaking with Elle UK, as cited by People magazine, about what she’d put herself through to maintain her figure for a role, Blunt says she sacrificed a lot just recently for her part in the upcoming “Adjustment Bureau.”

While on the set, she had to refrain from eating anything that might lead to weight gain, which made it so that she literally suffered from “burger envy,” because everybody else was having them and she wasn’t allowed to. However, once shooting was over, she made sure she got her “revenge,” indulging in her favorite foods and all her cravings. Unlike most female stars in Hollywood, Emily doesn’t believe a dress size or the number of pounds is what makes a woman gorgeous or not.

“This is my weekend of revenge on the diet I’ve had to be on for the re-shoots. Last night I had steamed pork buns that made me want to weep. I feel like I’m just emerging from a food coma,” Emily reveals. She’s far from the typical Hollywood girl, so hearing of her go on a detox diet or becoming a workout fanatic is very unlikely to happen. “I’m not on cleanses or doing Pilates every day! Not to stereotype Hollywood girls, but…,” she says, letting her words hang. She also hates airbrushing. “I don’t like it when they stretch you out and make you all long and skinny. It makes you look like a Barbie. Who the hell looks like that?” she says.

Emily Blunt is not the only Brit to hate and rebel against the way Hollywood stars adhere to certain unwritten rules, especially as concerns women and how they should all be a size 2 or 4 – at their largest. In recent months, Gemma Arterton also spoke against this impossible standardization of women, while British equality minister Lynne Featherstone said that all women should aspire to be a healthy and attainable size 14, like “Mad Men” star Christina Hendricks, a woman who got a lot of media attention for being the exact opposite of stick thin screen sirens.

“Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous. We need more of these role models. I am very keen that children and young women should be informed about airbrushing so they don’t fall victim to looking at an image and thinking that anyone can have a 12-inch waist. It’s so not possible. Advertisers and magazine editors have a right to publish what they choose, but women and girls also have a right to feel comfortable in their own bodies. At the moment they are being denied that. All women have felt that pressure of having to conform to an unrealistic stereotype, which plagues them their whole life. It’s not just the immediate harm, it’s something that lasts a lifetime,” Featherstone was saying not long ago, as we also reported at the time.

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