Shallow Hal, starring Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit, came out in 2001. It’s a film that could not be made today, hopefully. Black plays a character who is hypnotized into not seeing Rosemary (Paltrow) as a fat person and falls in love with her, the entire premise turning the movie in one very long fat joke. Now, Ivy Snitzer, the woman who played Paltrow’s body double in the movie when she was a 20-year-old acting student, has revealed to the Guardian that she suffered an eating disorder, and a weight-loss surgery so bungled that she almost died.
She says she got the surgery in the years after Shallow Hal premiered, but still has positive things to say about her experience on set. On set she felt “like I really mattered, like they couldn’t make the movie without me.” Black was “delightful,” and Paltrow “really nice,” and the actor took time to compliment Snitzer’s acting, according to the Guardian. She didn’t have qualms at the time about the movie’s premise, and in fact was excited to see a fat person portrayed in Paltrow’s character, Rosemary. She “was cool, she was popular, she had friends,” Snitzer said, whereas most fat people she observed depicted onscreen at the time were “villains.”
In the lead-up to the Shallow Hal premiere, Snitzer helped promote the film and said in interviews that “it is not the worst thing in the world to be fat.” This made some people very angry. The feedback she got was that she was “promoting obesity,” in the Guardian’s words. Someone sent diet pills to her home address, while others sent love letters, both of which “scared” Snitzer.
Soon after filming ended, she says she overexercised and purged, and underwent gastric band surgery in 2003, but she tells the Guardian the surgery wasn’t a direct result of doing the movie. Why did the surgery then, she said, was trying to be a “good fatty.” “Because I was supposed to! If you’re fat, you’re supposed to try to not be.”
Snitzer says the band eventually slipped and she got a torsion, but that she didn’t have health insurance after moving to LA with her writing partner. She had to wait three months after getting an office job before she could access the insurance that would allow her to get the life-saving surgery. She says she couldn’t keep much food down during that time.
“I was so thin you could see my teeth through my face and my skin was all gray,” she told the Guardian. “And I was just so bitchy all the time. I kind of alienated a lot of my friends. My mother was also dying; it was bleak. Humans shouldn’t have to experience how very bleak that particular time in my life was.”
Snitzer told the Guardian she was so ill by that time that the doctors couldn’t immediately remove the band. She says she was on liquid nutrition for four months, and that surgeons eventually removed part of her stomach. She notes that she still can’t eat and drink at the same time.
When she was malnourished and in need of lifesaving surgery, she was still treated better than when she was fat. “Everything was so different,” Snitzer said. “It was really nice to be treated well.”
Snitzer doesn’t hold resentments toward the movie. “I love that it’s a cool thing I did one time,” she said. “It didn’t make me feel bad about myself. Until you know, other people started telling me I probably should have felt bad about myself.”
Paltrow herself has said appearing in the film was a “disaster” and her least favorite performance of her career. “The first day I tried the fat suit on, I was in the Tribeca Grand and I walked through the lobby,” she told W Magazine at the time. “It was so sad. It was so disturbing. No one would make eye contact with me because I was obese.”
“I was wearing this black shirt with big snowmen on it. For some reason, the fat clothes they make for women that are overweight are horrible,” Paltrow said (still very much an issue). “I felt humiliated because people were really dismissive.”