No one but my mum wanted me to lose weight – but I was miserable and feared I’d die a virgin at 35, says Rebel Wilson
FIRST it was Prince Harry with Spare, then Britney Spears with The Woman In Me – now Rebel Wilson is jumping on the celebrity bombshell memoir bandwagon.
In it the Australian actress, who shot to fame over a decade ago as the “fat funny character” in hit comedy Bridesmaids, takes aim at the Hollywood players who “pigeon-holed” her as the overweight character.
Rebel, who has since undergone a dramatic glow-up, shedding five-and-a-half stone after embarking on a “year of health”, claims she was told not to lose weight for fear her career would nosedive.
She also reveals how childhood physical abuse at the hands of her father led her to become a secret binge eater and left her feeling so “unlovable” she refused to date anyone, fearing she would die a virgin before she had sex for the first time aged 35.
In a no-holds-barred interview ahead of the release of her book, Rebel Rising, out later this month, the actress said: “Basically no one apart from my mum wanted me to lose weight.
“People thought I’d lose my pigeonhole in my career, playing the fat funny character, and they wanted me to continue in that.”
Her candour shows she is fast becoming the ultimate Hollywood rebel, with Brit star Sacha Baron Cohen already reportedly threatening legal action over claims she makes in her book that she was disrespected on set on the set of their 2016 film Grimsby — allegations he strongly denies.
But the actress has never been a stereotypical star, having openly admitted she carved out her Hollywood career by looking “ugly”.
Rebel, who grew up the eldest of four children in Balmain, a working-class suburb of Sydney, says: “When I was younger I deliberately made myself less attractive . . . I wanted to make something of myself, have a great career and make a lot of money.
“I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously like a Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman, but I quickly realised that the bigger you were, the more audiences laughed.
“So I’d have my gut hanging out and wear micro-shorts on stage, no make-up, stuff that horrified my mother.
“It was a really conscious decision to look ugly. It was part of my plan.”
Her unusual name came from her mum Sue Bownds, a breeder who showed dogs, but she claims her dad Victor Wilson, who owned a pet supplies company, never agreed with it, insisting on calling her Melanie instead.
Rebel writes in her memoir: “Mum didn’t stand up to Dad that day, nor for almost 17 subsequent years.”
It was her relationship with her dad that fostered her unhealthy relationship with food.
She recalls how he once hit her three times across the face as a child.
On a separate occasion, after begging him for a slurpee — a frozen drink — she says he threatened: “I’m going to choke you and kill you if you say one more thing, Melanie.”
Speaking in a candid interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, she admits: “In those moments when I was worried or scared, I turned to food.”
In 2003 she had her first cameo role in the Australian comedy film Fat Pizza and the TV series of the same name.
She played Toula, the overweight girlfriend of Habib, who worked as a pizza delivery driver and drug dealer.
In her book she accuses the show of making her the target of jokes about her size and appearance, but while she “willingly” played the “big fat whale that got laughs”, she was determined to give her character more depth.
Determination to ‘make it’
“I was in a boys’ show, so I had to take their fatphobic jokes right on my double chin,” she writes.
“All people cared about was that I was fat and funny. And I was doing both of those things very well.”
Fat Pizza creator Paul Fenech has hit back, speaking in an interview over the weekend, he said: “Rebel was happy building a career playing the big girl in Hollywood, now she’s saying we did her wrong?
“We gave her a start, took her around the world, gave her stage training and TV and feature film opportunities. How ungrateful.”
Fuelled by self belief and a determination to “make it”, Rebel moved to Hollywood and landed her break in Bridesmaids, stealing the show as Brynn, the oddball sister of Matt Lucas’ character.
The pair became firm friends, with Rebel moving to the British comedian’s West Hollywood home where she lived for two-and-a-half years.
Matt previously said: “We’re not very rock’n’roll.
“Our drug is Weight Watchers’ ice cream in tubs.”
At a dinner at Matt’s home she was introduced to Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen, who later cast her as his character Nobby’s plus-size wife Dawn in Grimsby.
Rebel says: “It turned out to be the worst professional experience of my career.”
She claims she felt “disrespected on set” but chose not to speak out over fears she would be branded “a troublemaker”.
“It’s one thing for someone who is fat to exploit their size for comedy, but it’s another for somebody else to humiliate you,” she says.
Rebel claims her costumes were chosen so you could “see all the cellulite on my thighs”, and that she was asked to “stick her finger up [Sacha’s] butt” during a sex scene, which she says she refused to do.
Several never-before-seen clips from the movie have since been leaked, showing the pair blocking out the scene, with her appearing to be on board with it.
But Rebel insists the video has been “edited” and shared out of context.
She said in a statement: “It is an a**hole move to release footage of one part of that disgusting episode while leaving out everything that preceded it including my horrified refusal to stick my finger up SBC’s butt… Releasing unauthorised and misleading behind-the-scenes video without my approval is SBC’s latest way of bullying and gaslighting me.”
Grimsby was a rare flop for Rebel.
In 2019 she teamed up with Anne Hathaway in The Hustle, and the same year she played the leading lady in the comedy musical Isn’t It Romantic.
In the Pitch Perfect trilogy, which ran from 2012 to 2017, Rebel played Patricia “Fat Amy” Hobart.
Last year she claimed there was a clause in her contract preventing her from slimming down: “I couldn’t lose a massive amount of weight because it was in the contracts for that movie.
“You can’t lose — I think it’s not more than 10 pounds or gain more than 10 pounds.”
Rebel added: “I was stereotyped in playing that fat, funny friend, which is so hard because I love those roles.
“But then I did want to do more things, but I felt like being the bigger girl, you’re just more pigeonholed.”
A UK size 20-22, she had become the poster girl for the body positive movement, “applauded” for being plus size.
But behind closed doors she struggled with binge eating, admitting: “I was just sitting in my apartment, watching TV and eating pints of ice cream.”
In 2019, having started the process to freeze her eggs, a fertility doctor told her she stood a better chance at IVF if she lost weight.
‘The funny fat girl’
She had been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which can affect your ability to conceive.
But she claims her management team was resistant to her losing weight.
She told BBC Breakfast in 2021: “I got a lot of pushback from my own team actually, here in Hollywood, when I said, ‘OK, I’m going to do this year of health, I feel like I’m really going to physically transform and change my life’.
“And they were like, ‘Why? Why would you want to do that?’ Because I was earning millions of dollars being the funny fat girl.”
Rebel worked with a doctor to help her to overcome her emotional eating and the weight “just kinda dropped off”.
After her dad died aged 62 from a heart attack in 2013, Rebel says it “opened her heart up to love” and made her think “maybe there could be relationships that are positive”.
Rebel started buying self-help books including Get The Guy by Matthew Hussey, before a co-star from Pitch Perfect set her up on a date with a man called Mickey in 2015, with whom she lost her virginity.
But it was an on-screen kiss with actress Charlotte Gainsbourg in the 2022 indie film The Almond And The Seahorse that proved life-changing.
It set her on a path of discovery that her sexuality was “fluid” and that being with a woman “wasn’t a big deal”.
In 2021 she was set up by a friend with her now fiancée, fashion designer Ramona Agruma, 40.
The actress decided to go public with their relationship, her first with a woman, in 2022 after a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald contacted her publicist saying they were planning to run a story “outing” her.
She opted to gazump the story, posting a picture of them on Instagram with the caption: “I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince… but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess.”
Rebel says: “I don’t really hold grudges.
“But I just thought that outing of celebrities was not a thing anymore.
“You shouldn’t have to come out anyway – you just are whatever you are.”
The couple got engaged last February and have a 16-month-old daughter, Roycie, born by surrogate.
They’re set to tie the knot later this year.
No matter what happens next in her life – both professionally and personally – no doubt Rebel will be doing it her own way.
