Elisha Cuthbert’s position as an ex-porn star in 2004’s The Girl Next Door solidified her status as a intercourse image. Now, almost twenty years later, the actress says society nonetheless pressures her to dwell as much as that title.
“There was this pressure of, like, maybe the fashion world or whatever saw me as a certain thing when really it was a character,” she advised Paris Hilton on Monday’s episode of her podcast, This is Paris, of the eye that got here after the film was launched.
Even as we speak, she says it is uncommon for individuals to not carry up the truth that she was as soon as named the “most beautiful woman in television” by males’s publications like Maxim and FHM within the mid-2000s.
“It ends up getting in the bio somehow, and you’re just like, what does that even mean? It’s not really a reflection of me as an artist,” the 24 alum defined. “But on the flip side of it … if that’s what they see and they liked that, too, I’m OK with it. For a long time, I’ve had a lot of disdain for it and wanted to push against it, but I kept getting thrown back into that sort of stereotype. Now I’ve learned to sort of embrace it.”
Though her position in The Girl Next Door “struck a chord with a lot of people,” it is not one thing she dwells on in her on a regular basis life.
“I certainly don’t try to keep up with it,” Cuthbert, 39, mentioned. “I would go crazy if I felt like I had to, every time I showed up [to an event], I looked like her. For me it’s not even me, it’s that character. So it seems so strange to live up to a character I played when I was 21.”
“For me, developing that character felt like such an exploration and it felt like such a deep dive,” she defined. “I didn’t feel understood [by the public], because I felt like I had developed that character. I didn’t come to the movie like that. That was my development for that character, so I felt that got lost.”
Given the impression her position had on the time, Cuthbert says followers refuse to let her age.
“Comments are just so weird. It’s like, ‘Oh you look older!’ Sure I do. That’s the way the world works,” she mentioned. “I’ll be on social media and I’ll see a comment like, ‘Oh, why are you so old now?’ Because I am! Because I’m just older than I was. I’m like, I don’t know what you’re comparing it too. Do you know what I mean? There’s this weird feeling, like, people don’t want to see actors or musicians age in any way. So it’s a sorta strange thing.”
Cuthbert has been open previously about how she’s dealt with the strain of being labeled a intercourse image.
“It’s not like I won an Olympic medal,” she mentioned in an August 2022 interview for the podcast Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson. “It was just some list some random magazine decided to create. When someone reads my bio, those things come up. They actually don’t mean anything in regards to me as a person or my career.”
Many of these photographs are nonetheless in circulation, she defined.
“This is what I have to explain to my kids,” she mentioned of her daughter, 4, and her son, 9 months. “This weird, bizarre outfit and hair extensions. And you know what’s so crazy? I don’t even know how much of those pictures are even accurate as far as, like, airbrushing … I was in my early 20s. I didn’t look bad, but did I look that? I don’t even know if the fantasy’s real.”
Wellness, parenting, physique picture and extra: Get to know the who behind the hoo with Yahoo Life’s publication. Sign up right here.
