“I’m retired from talking about my body,” Bryce Dallas Howard tells me as we sit in a fancy Manhattan hotel lobby a few days before the premiere of her new movie Argylle. It turns out, however, that she has plenty to say about it.
To be fair, I was the one who started the conversation. I had gone to a screening a few weeks earlier, and I could not take my eyes off Howard. She looked like so many women I knew. O.K., more beautiful than most women I know, but with a familiar silhouette. The feeling was reminiscent of the first time I saw a female in an action movie who could hold her own. (It was the drinking scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, regrettably, but still!) A bit like terror, and a bit like hope.
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It feels taboo to even talk about this, but Howard, who plays a spy novelist with mysterious powers, is what is sometimes referred to in the fashion industry as “not sample size.” (Sample sizes start at 4 and go down from there.) “I straight up said to Matthew, ‘I just want you to know that this is my body. And if you want my body to be smaller, I think you should hire someone else,’” says Howard of her conversation with British director Matthew Vaughn when he asked her to do the role. “And he said, ‘No, I’m hiring you because of you.’”
Argylle opens the way pretty much all blockbustery secret-agent movies do: handsome jacked man (Henry Cavill does the honors) meets sylph-like woman (
It’s all a little much, even from Vaughn, who, with the
A beautiful, smart, non-sample-size woman in a $200 million action movie by a major director should not be that rare in 2024, but it is. And it should also not feel like such a blow for rightsizing our attitude toward women’s bodies, but it does. “It’s very strange that that’s been something that’s been specifically policed, where people hiring actresses say, ‘We want you, but 20 pounds less you,’” says Howard. “What it means is the person who would be what is called straight-sized, or medium, is being forced for a period of time to become fatigued, which is not sustainable.”
Sure, there have been movies featuring non-skinny women, most of them named Melissa McCarthy, but in many the weight is played for laughs. Sometimes the actor seems to be in on the joke, like when Rebel Wilson’s character embraces the name Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect or McCarthy and Octavia Spencer squeeze into a tiny car in
Howard has talked before about the impossible standards women in Hollywood face. At the 2016 Golden Globes Red Carpet, she
But the attitude extends way beyond movie stars. Despite the activism of advocates for body acceptance, not being thin is considered, to many in the U.S., such a horrific fate that there isn’t even an acceptable, nonjudgmental word for it. Heavy, ample, plump, tubby—these might as well be curse words. It’s not people’s fault for feeling this way; society tells us from the time we’re young that thin is perpetually in.
And while we’re not supposed to comment on body size, the pressure to shrink oneself doesn’t go away just because it’s not verbalized. In the
Howard admits that with a famous director dad, her “proximity to power since childhood has been immense,” and therefore she has more protection from the whims of producers than others. Or as she puts it, she sometimes has “a f-ck-you 15” that producers have to deal with or not. It’s strange that this blow for returning our sense of a woman’s size to normality should come from a director like Vaughn, who is married to Claudia Schiffer, a legit supermodel. But for the sake of women everywhere, and their daughters, we’ll take it.