Ivy Snitzer had always joked about her size, but when it was magnified on the big screen, her insecurities ballooned — and it proved near-fatal.
Snitzer was cast as Gwyneth Paltrow’s body double in the 2001 flick “Shallow Hal,” featuring Jack Black as the titular character who is hypnotized to fall head-over-heels for a woman’s inner beauty rather than her outward appearance.
While Paltrow, who plays the role of the overweight love interest named Rosemary, wore a fat suit in the film, Snitzer, now 42, appeared in close-ups of the character’s body.
She was never offended by the script’s attempts to poke fun at her appearance — in part due to the fact she, too, cracked similar jokes — and said the cast “treated me like I really mattered, like they couldn’t make the movie without me,” she told Amelia Tait for her newsletter The Waiting Room.
“It was so exciting. It was just fun to be part of a movie – there are so few people who actually get to do that.”
Paltrow was “really nice” and Black “a delightful person,” and the starlet finally felt noticed for her persona — ironically, the plot line of the film — after fighting “really hard to be seen as a personality and not just my size.”
But the film’s seemingly progressive storyline – that the “obese” character wasn’t a “villain,” but rather a “cool,” “popular” girl — instead welcomed an onslaught of body-shamers who zeroed in on Snitzer’s weight.
It was then that Snitzer’s taste of the limelight soured.
Strangers on the street expressed their outrage, others claimed she was promoting obesity — and one person even went so far as to mail her diet pills.
“I got really scared,” she said. “I was, like: Maybe I’m done with the concept of fame, maybe I don’t want to be an actor. Maybe I’ll do something else.”
She trekked back to New York and moved in with her parents, juggling various jobs — bartender, cater waiter, comedian — and while casting directors offered her roles, they were “mean,” she recalled.
It was the opposite of why the burgeoning starlet ventured to Hollywood in the first place: “I just want to make people laugh; I don’t want to make people sad.”
Life after her short-lived stardom was not all glitz and glamour — less than two years after the movie’s release, she nearly died due to weight loss.
She was “technically starving to death” after a gastric band surgery had gone wrong.
Coupled with excessive exercise and slipping back into disordered eating habits inherited from her youth, Snitzer’s band slipped and she “got a torsion,” a potentially fatal stomach complication.
But her lack of health insurance forced her into a temp job in Beverly Hills, where she had to wait out the three-month probation period and could only drink liquids the consistency of water.
“I was so thin, you could see my teeth through my face and my skin was all gray,” she said, adding that her “bitchy” attitude meant she “alienated” many of her friends.
In fact, she was so malnourished that by the time she could seek proper medical care, they couldn’t remove her gastric band, she claimed. Instead, she received IV fluids each night to “not die” and ultimately underwent a gastric bypass procedure to remove part of her stomach.
When reflecting on her decision to go under the knife initially, she said she felt like she “was supposed to.”
“If you’re fat, you’re supposed to try to not be,” said Snitzer, who now works as an insurance agency owner in Philadelphia.
While she initially claimed the “Shallow Hal” scrutiny wasn’t tied to her weight-loss surgery — it was merely a coincidence, she said, that her doctor’s stark warning about her weight prompted the procedure at the time — she admitted that perhaps it was linked subconsciously.
“I’m sure I wanted to be small and not seen,” she said. “I’m sure that’s there, but I don’t ever remember consciously thinking about it.”
However, Snitzer regrets neither the surgery nor her time on set, despite the tumultuous aftermath.
In fact, it’s a “cool thing” she did “one time,” she declared — in other words, a good story to tell at parties.
“It didn’t make me feel bad about myself,” she said of the film. “Until, you know, other people started telling me I probably should have felt bad about myself.”
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