Elisha Cuthbert is getting real about the pressures she’s faced in the industry
In an interview on the Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson podcast, the 39-year-old actress spoke out about how she was pressured into posing for men’s magazines like FHM, Complex, and Maxim as far back as 2003. She shared:
“I’ve been pretty vocal about my sort of, I don’t want to say disappointment about being in that whole circus.
But there was really no option back then, though. You are out promoting something. That’s what the [film] studio wanted you to do.”
She went on to say that it was how things were at the time, saying:
“We kind of ended up in a space at the time where that was really happening. I mean, Halle Berry was doing it, for God’s sake. Jennifer Aniston was doing it…
We were probably too young to be subjected to that, and feeling pressured to do that.”
Elisha noted that there was a reason studios would push young actresses like her to appear in those publications:
“Those magazines were viewed by 30 million people. There was no arguing that it was a way to be seen and to promote anything that you were doing at the time.”
Through the years, Elisha was featured on lists like “Sexiest Women In The World,” and it all culminated in her being named TV’s Most Beautiful Woman in 2013 by Maxim. She said about these lists:
“The lists would kind of come out on a sidebar and you’d get a message from your publicist like, ‘Oh, you’re number three.’
What was that list?! Nowadays that would never be allowed, right?”
But there was a time that those things were allowed – and are now preserved for posterity via photos and the like:
“This is what I have to explain to my kids. The bizarre outfit and hair extensions.
Even when someone reads my bio, those things come up. They actually don’t mean anything in regards to me as a person or my career. It’s not like I won an Olympic medal. It was some list some random magazine decided to create.”
