Gwyneth Paltrow’s Shallow Hal Body Double Says She Almost Starved to Death After the Film's Release

glamour.com:

Shallow Hal? Frankly, I wish I could forget. In this controversial romantic comedy, Jack Black plays an arrogant bachelor who gets hypnotized into only seeing people's inner beauty.

He soon falls for Rosemary, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, not realizing that she is actually a 300-pound woman. But Paltrow wasn't the only actor enlisted to embody Rosemary.Ivy Snitzer, then 20 years old, was hired to be Paltrow's body double for the film, which used closeups of her arms, torso, and thighs in scenes where Paltrow's face didn't need to be shown.

But Snitzer's work on the movie came at great personal cost. In a conversation with pop culture newsletter “The Waiting Room,” which was subsequently republished by , Snitzer spoke positively of her experience on set."At that point, if you saw someone obese in a movie, they were a villain," she explained. "Out of all of the fat people in the world that they could have hired for that job, they hired me, because of my personality.

Before, I had to fight really hard to be seen as a personality and not just my size."That said, there was emotional and physical fallout following the movie's release."It didn't occur to me that the film would be seen by millions of people," Snitzer continued. "It was like the worst parts about being fat were magnified.