Stand strong! Melanie Lynskey’s most powerful body positivity quotes
Lead by example. Melanie Lynskey has been candid about embracing her body over the years.
“It has been a very long journey. I’ve been fighting it for a long time — the shape my body should be,” said the Sweets well-known star during a June 2022 interview with deSkimm. “[It’s] hard to be a size 40 next to a size 0. I haven’t really eaten for years and was very concerned about how I looked.
Lynskey, who admitted to struggling with an eating disorder as a teen, explained that a miscarriage made her see her body in a new light.
“I had a miscarriage a few years ago and I just wasn’t really physically recovering from it and having a very young daughter really made me think, ‘Okay, I need to be nicer to myself and accept and say I’m sorry’ my body for what it just experienced, ”the Sweet Home Alabama said the actress at the time, noting that she wanted to give her daughter, whom she welcomed with her husband Jason Ritter in December 2018, a “positive example of what it looks like to have a mom who just accepts her body.”
Although Lynskey has learned to love her curves, she is often criticized by others for her looks.
“Her body says a life of luxury…not post-apocalyptic [sic] warlord. Where is [Terminator star] Linda Hamilton when do you need her?” former America’s next top model champion Adrianne Curry tweeted in February 2023, claiming that Lynskey was not right to play Kathleen on HBO’s The last of us, which premiered a month earlier.
The New Zealander, for her part, quickly hit back at Curry’s claims. She wrote through Twitter: “I play a person who carefully planned and executed an overthrow of FEDRA. I’m supposed to be SMART, ma’am. I don’t have to be muscular. That’s what accomplices are for.”
She continued at the time, “I am also grateful because the love and support I receive from all of you is so overwhelming and powerful – I feel like we are a community and I feel very much seen and loved. I am so thankful to Craig and Neil for creating a truly new character. Someone I’ve never seen before. And because you entrusted her to me. … What excited me most about doing #TheLastOfUs is that my casting suggested the possibility of a future where people are going to listen to the person with the best ideas.
Not only has Lynskey stood up for herself against trolls, but she also has the support of the Parenting alum, whom she married in 2020.
“If anyone has any more unsolicited comments about *someone’s* body, feel free to write them in permanent ink on their own forehead and dive straight into the sun,” Ritter tweeted in January 2022, a co-signer of one of the Yellow jackets star’s past flips over criticism of her looks.
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