‘This Is Us’ alum Chrissy Metz recalls pre-fame weight discrimination on airplanes: Passengers ‘wouldn’t look at me’
“This Is Us” alum Chrissy Metz said she was discriminated against on airplanes before she became famous.
“Before the show, I could go on an airplane and someone could, like, not want to sit next to me if they were, like, too squished, or they were gonna be like, ‘Oh gosh here comes a big girl that I have to sit next to,'” she recalled on Monday’s episode of the “Jamie Kern Lima Show.”
“But because now I’m on a TV show they don’t care.”
She added, “It was always like [sigh], like they’re gonna be bothered that I’m sitting next to them or they wouldn’t, you know, look at me twice or they would not engage.”
“And then when I became — let’s put it in air quotes — famous, then they would wanna have a conversation or they were more apt to wanna sit next to me.”
Metz, 44, told host Jamie Kerna Lima that she’s not sure what to make of her experiences because she feels that the judgment hasn’t actually disappeared.
“Because the judgment is now, oh, I’m famous or like, maybe what could I provide to them or what insight could I share with them?” she theorized. “Or, I don’t know, like do they feel cooler because they’re sitting next to someone who is famous?”
“It’s such a weird mind twist of things,” she noted.
The “Masked Singer” Season 11 contestant also reflected on the judgment she received over her weight within her household as a child.
“[My stepfather] would weigh me in the kitchen or threaten to lock the cupboards,” she recalled to Lima. “I mean, [it was] definitely mental, physical, emotional abuse for sure.”
Further remembering her childhood and the stigma surrounding her weight, she added, “The emotional stuff … they’re like little nicks, little cuts, and eventually you bleed out. It is painful.”
“I’m trying to heal those wounds slowly but surely. And it’s not easy … The root of it is, ‘I’m unworthy.'”
Metz has never shied away from discussing how her weight and the attention on it affected her growing up.
In 2017, she recalled stepping on a Weight Watchers (now called WW) scale for the first time at the age of 11.
In her 2018 memoir “This Is Me,” she revealed her stepfather would beat her and weigh her just to humiliate her.
“He’d get the scale from the bathroom and clang it hard on the kitchen floor. ‘Well, get on the damn thing!’ Trigger would yell,” she wrote.
The Emmy nominee also candidly revealed in 2016 that her “This Is Us” contract included a weight-loss clause, which she wholeheartedly accepted.
“In our contract, it did state that that would be a part of it, to lose the weight in the trajectory of the character as she comes to find herself,” she told TVLine.
“That was a win-win for me. Because it’s one thing to try to do it on your own.”
“But as human beings, it’s an ego thing: We’re more likely to do something for someone else”
