Amber Tamblyn hit it big in Hollywood early on with a long-running role on soap opera General Hospital, beginning when she was just 12 years old. A decade later, she starred as Tibby in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and in the more than 10 years since, she's starred in dozens more movies and TV shows. Despite all this early and consistent success, however, Amber has unfortunately not been immune to the damaging and offensive pressures of the entertainment industry. In a discussion with The New York Times's Jodi Kantor in New York City on Tuesday, the actor remembered instances throughout her career when she had been told she'd need to change her physical appearance in order to be successful — again, despite the fact that she's been working continually for more than two decades.
One of those moments occurred right after Amber had starred in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, when a Warner Bros. exec asked her agent to pass on the message that Amber could be a huge star if she lost some weight. "I think at that point I was 128 pounds and I'm 5'7". I remember my agent saying to me — and she was a woman — 'You have a real choice here. You can either be Nicole Kidman or you can be a character actress,'" Amber said, according to E! News. "And at that time, I was like 21 years old, so if you look at that and use that as an example and imagine that for over two decades, forms of that from when you're a child to all the way up, it does something to you."
Sadly, that's far from the only way that Amber's body and voice have been marginalized throughout her time onscreen. "They were always different forms of being shut out of conversations, or being boxed out of different places in which I know my voice should exist, or being told under certain circumstances I had to look a certain way or I was going to fail," she said when Kantor asked how Amber had been "violated" in her career.
Amber wrote about the pressure to fulfill unattainable standards of beauty in an op-ed she penned for The New York Times earlier this year, ahead of the Time's Up protest at the Golden Globe Awards. In the piece, she described how a director had asked her to lose five pounds before shooting his film, with the help of a trainer and meal plan provided by the film studio. "Women have always had to carry the burden of molding the shapes and sizes of our bodies to the trends and tastes of others, at any cost. We are assigned a look. We don't get to choose."
Related: Amber Tamblyn Pens Open Letter to James Woods
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