A few years ago, Kick-Ass star Chloe Grace Moretz was pictured heading into a hotel with her legs on full display. The majority of her fans saw that and simply admired how great she looked, but others chose to make some unflattering comparisons to a cutaway scene from Family Guy.
We won't share the now infamous image here (it's not hard to find), but The Equalizer star has now opened up on how that made her feel in an interview with Hunger TV.
Explaining that a lot of the attention surrounding her body resulted in her going to therapy, the actress explained, "Then came the onslaught of horrific memes that started getting sent to me about my body. I’ve actually never really talked about this, but there was one meme that really affected me, of me walking into a hotel with a pizza box in my hand."
"And this photo got manipulated into a character from Family Guy with the long legs and the short torso, and it was one of the most widespread memes at the time."
"Everyone was making fun of my body and I brought it up with someone and they were like, ‘Oh, shut the f*** up, it’s funny,'" Moretz recalls. "And I just remember sitting there and thinking, my body is being used as a joke and it’s something that I can’t change about who I am, and it is being posted all over Instagram. It was something so benign as walking into a hotel with leftovers. And to this day, when I see that meme, it’s something very hard for me to overcome."
It's upsetting to hear what an impact this had on the Hit-Girl actress and she admitted that, "It took a layer of something that I used to enjoy, which was getting dressed up and going to a carpet and taking a photo, and made me super self-conscious. And I think that body dysmorphia – which we all deal with in this world – is extrapolated by the issues of social media."
Hopefully, this is something that the actress will be able to overcome, though it says a lot about the toxicity of social media. While she's previously dismissed the notion of returning for a possible Kick-Ass 3, Moretz has lots of other projects in the pipeline, including The Peripheral, White Knight, and Love Is a Gun.
What are your thoughts on Moretz's comments? Let us know that down in the comments section.