Calista Flockhart on her weight: ‘I just have small bones, and I just am lucky.’

9 months ago 28
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Calista Flockhart works so rarely in television or films, it always feels like an event when she’s actually out of the house. She’s now starring in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and she plays Lee Radziwell, Jackie Kennedy’s sister. She’s joined by Naomi Watts (Babe Paley), Diane Lane (Slim Keith), Chloe Sevigny (CZ Guest), Molly Ringwald (Joanne Carson) and Demi Moore (Ann Woodward). Calista recently gave a pretty great interview to Maureen Dowd at the NY Times about Feud, about being married to Harrison Ford and about life in general. She also touches on the ‘90s sh-t – all of the conversations about her short skirts and whether she had an eating disorder. Some highlights:

She would have had lunch with the Swans: “Maybe once. I felt very sorry for them. Here they are, the toast of New York — rich, jewels, apartments, houses in the country, houses in Europe. They travel all the time on private planes. They have yachts. They are dictating what is in and what is not. Underneath all that, they were very sad, very lonely and really unhappy women.”

She loved the costumes but her real style isn’t like that: “I should have lived in the ’60s, for sure…[but] I’m not going to wear a purse that says Gucci all over it, because that just seems strange. I’m also just very frugal. I have some really beautiful designer clothes, but 90 percent of my wardrobe is from Nordstrom. Just what’s comfortable, what works. I have a uniform. I switch from a gray sweater to a black sweater back to the gray sweater to a black sweater.”

On Lee Radziwell: “Truman Capote recognized that she was living in her sister’s shadow, and he would say things: ‘You’re so much prettier. You’re so much smarter. You’re more interesting. You have better style.’ She really needed to hear that. I think it made her really love Truman. He was fun, and she confided in him, like they all did.”

On all of the criticism of Ally McBeal’s short skirts: “I have a lot of distance and perspective, and I’m still incredulous. I cannot believe that I was scrutinized and pursued like that. It was intense and it was unfair.” Ms. Flockhart recalled how casually that wardrobe decision had been made: “I said to the costume designer: ‘It either has to be long or short. It can’t be in the middle, because that doesn’t make my leg look good.’ She said, ‘OK, let’s go short.’ I said, ‘Cool, let’s go short.’ And then all of a sudden there was this huge short-skirt scandal, which was really fun.”

The conversations about whether she was anorexic: “I don’t think that would ever happen today. They call it body-shaming now. I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but it’s really not OK to accuse someone of having a disease that a lot of people struggle with. It wasn’t the case, and there was nothing I could do to convince anybody or get out of it. If I had worn a big padded bra, they probably would never have been able to target me in that way. I look back at pictures, and I’m the same then as I am now, and nobody says a word now. I was an easy target, I guess. It was painful, it was complicated. I loved working on ‘Ally McBeal,’ and it just made it sour. I was very sleep-deprived and I was depressed about it. I did think that it was going to ruin my career. I didn’t think anybody would ever hire me again, because they would just assume I had anorexia, and that would be the end of that.”

She’s always been naturally small: “I honestly have never been in a situation where I have to watch my weight. My mom is 4-11 now, and she weighed 93 pounds when she was married. Talk about a little tiny elf. I just have small bones, and I just am lucky.”

Why her marriage to Harrison has worked: She mused that one of the reasons that it has worked is because she was “really content being home” as a full-time mom. “I didn’t have the same dreams at the time, so we weren’t competing with each other. We’re very independent of each other in some ways and probably incredibly codependent on each other in others.”

Her independence startled him at first. “It scares him, I think, sometimes. When I first met him, he said, ‘You are the most self-sufficient woman in the world, and I don’t know how I feel about that.’ I remember I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Because I didn’t recognize I was self-sufficient. The other reason it works is, we’re both pretty introverted. We stay home a lot, homebodies, which is nice.”

[From The NY Times]

If you go to the full piece, there’s a cute back-and-forth between Harrison and Calista about how they met (Harrison was interviewed separately). Basically, Harrison caught a glimpse of Calista at the 2002 Golden Globes and he was like “who is that??” He went over to her and tried to chat her up but she was ambivalent, but they kept talking later in the evening and he asked her out, and they’ve basically been together since their first date. She doesn’t make a big deal about “oh, I’m the wife of a Hollywood power player,” and it feels like neither of them really revel in that side of things. She’s just happy at home, raising her son and living her life. I also believe her when she says that she’s just naturally small. Some people are just fine-boned. And yes, all of those conversations about her body were gross at the time.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

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  3. Calista Flockhart on her weight: ‘I just have small bones, and I just am lucky.’

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