Melanie Lynskey spoke openly about her life-long struggle with an eating disorder that she says began when she was twelve years old.
The actress told Vulture in an interview published this week that her disordered eating started at home as her mother had “a lot of issues around food and was anorexic for a lot of my growing up. It was hard for her to look at my body objectively. I think she just saw what she saw in herself.” She added, “I thought you were supposed to have a gap between your thighs. I became obsessed with that.”
Lynskey went on to explain that things only got worse when her breakout film Heavenly Creatures premiered in 1994. The then-16-year-old “kept getting reminded I was not the things you needed to be—thin, confident, pretty. Mostly thin. There was a certain pleasant energy they wanted people to have. Unchallenging. And I wasn’t successful doing that.”
But when she met her then-boyfriend, actor Andrew Howard, on the set of The Cherry Orchard five years later, her relationship to her own body began to change for the better. “The closest thing I’ve had to an intervention was when I was living with him, and he got really intense about my eating issues,” she explained. “He tried to stop me from monitoring my own eating and talked to me about how thin I was. Of course, in my mind, I thought he was nuts. I’d never had anybody care that much. I’d never had anybody be like, This is really painful. The people I had confided in were usually people who also had eating issues, so it would become about swapping tips.”
The Yellowjackets star said it was those conversations with Howard that “changed my life. I stopped throwing up, mostly. It took a while. But that was a big one. I had, for a very long time, been on this diet that was basically 800 calories a day, and if I ate anything over 800 calories, I would throw up. I was never bingey. Sometimes I’d be starving, and I’d have another teacup of Special K. Then I’d be like, Well, now I gotta throw it up.”
Lynskey has also been candid about her eating disorder in the past, telling People in 2016, “I was very unwell for a long time. I had eating issues and at a certain point I was like, ‘I’m not going to survive’—not like I was on death’s door or anything, but I was so unhappy and my hair was falling out.” She added that before she was able to start healing from that, “I did have to truly become comfortable with myself, because you can’t fake it.”