Actress Kate Bosworth shared her anxiety-ridden experience of growing up in Hollywood under the scrutiny of fame, and how it has led her to have more empathy for younger generations who feel pressure to reach "unattainable" perfection.
On the latest episode of InStyle's Ladies First With Laura Brown podcast, Bosworth opened up about the unrelenting criticism she faced as a young actress.
"It was so intense and overwhelming," she explained to host Brown. "It was a really, really hard time, and I did not know how to handle that at all. And I also did not know how to really communicate through that very well to support systems or to my friends or family."
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Bosworth started out acting in small independent films, and eventually landed a small role in 2000 in the critically-acclaimed Remember The Titans. Her breakout role however was in 2002 surfing movie Blue Crush, which she landed just a year after graduating high school. She later starred in a slew of films, including 21 and 2006 film Superman Returns, in which she played Lois Lane. However, Bosworth says that the early years caused her so much anxiety that you could physically see it in pictures — in her lack of smile and her physique.
"I was losing a lot of weight because I was really under a lot of scrutiny, and I was so stressed and spun out that if you see images of me then, it's like seeing someone under duress," Bosworth said. "And I think that a lot of times people in the spotlight get this sort of thing, like, 'Well, that's what you chose,' and that's what it is."
Throughout the early 2000s, she said she experienced a "real kind of cruelty" from the public, the media, and those around her, and that much of that stemmed from starting out in the business so young and being extremely hard on herself.
"When you take a small town kid...and then all of sudden there's this intense amount of scrutiny and criticism and...it's so heartbreaking. I felt like I wanted to disappear, I really did," she said.
She said that having that experience makes her really understand and have a lot of sympathy for young people, who perhaps haven't grown up under the spotlight of Hollywood, but of social media. Much of this empathy, however, led to something good, as it was the fuel for her positivity-geared lifestyle website KIND.EST, which highlights the stories of people who "make our world better."