Alicia Silverstone will be forever known to us as Cher Horowitz from Clueless, but unfortunately, she says there's a different Hollywood role that haunts her. Two years after Clueless, she filmed the critically panned Batman & Robin alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell. Worse than the reviews was the body-shaming that followed her after, with tabloids referring to the actress as "Fatgirl" and one journalist asking what her bra size was during an interview.
“That definitely wasn’t my favourite film-making experience,” Silverstone told The Guardian, adding, "They would make fun of my body when I was younger. It was hurtful but I knew they were wrong. I wasn’t confused. I knew that it was not right to make fun of someone’s body shape, that doesn’t seem like the right thing to be doing to a human."
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The experience meant she "stopped loving acting for a very long time," she said, but she has since found new life in the theatre. She's starred in both The Graduate and The Performers on Broadway, and her next role is a return to the big screen in Bad Therapy before hopping over to Netflix to star as Elizabeth Thomas-Brewer in their TV adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club.
The only way she was able to move on from the mistreatment of her youth was to grow from it.
"I didn’t say ‘fuck you’ and come out like a warrior but I would just walk away and go, 'Okay, I know what that is and I’m done, I’m not going near that again,'" she told the outlet.
Or, in the words of Cher Horowitz, "as if."