COMFORTABLE IN HER OWN SKIN
Critics say I Feel Pretty gets beauty wrong, but Schumer says it’s about confidence
When you’re doing press for a movie that’s all about how confidence is the key to looking your best, what do you wear when you’re not feeling so hot? If you’re Amy Schumer, you go for business on top (a blazer and blouse), casual on the bottom (sweatpants and sneakers).
“I feel like garbage today,” Schumer says, noting it’s the second day of her period. “But I knew the cameras were only going to shoot waist-up, so I’m in huge underwear and dirty sweatpants — and I’m feeling blessed as hell.”
For the most part, she IS blessed as hell. After becoming a household name through her Comedy Central sketch show Inside Amy Schumer, she’s starred in films, both successful (Trainwreck), and not so much (Snatched); written a bestselling book of essays; branched out to Broadway (starring in Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower); planned a host of upcoming projects, including a script with Jennifer Lawrence; and has been pushing for gun control. Schumer has reached that point in her career, and in her life as a woman in the spotlight, where she knows it doesn’t matter what she wears, as long as she owns it.
The character she plays in I Feel Pretty, which Schumer coproduced, is far from that realization. Renee has cripplingly low self-esteem, which holds her back in her career and her love life. She can dress up and put on makeup from the fancy cosmetic line she works for, but all she sees in the mirror is something in need of polish and improvement, the equivalent of dirty sweatpants.
Until the day Renee falls off her bike at SoulCycle and bonks her head. When she comes to, she suddenly sees herself as super model gorgeous. Cue the work success, cute new boyfriend ... and the predictable Twitter backlash to the movie trailer.
Some saw the movie’s premise as offensive — that a woman needs to sustain a traumatic brain injury to feel beautiful. And by the way, Schumer is already beautiful. But the trailer critics should wait to judge the full arc of the movie, says Schumer, who brings to the project years of experience dealing with haters and body-image issues, onscreen and off.
“This isn’t a story about a fat, ugly woman who gets beautiful,” Schumer says. “It’s about a girl with really low self-esteem ... Even those who are considered the hottest girls, they have crippling selfesteem as well.”
“People got upset about, ‘Oh, a woman has to hit her head and feel good about herself ?!’ ” says Rory Scovel, who plays Schumer’s love interest, Ethan. “But this particular woman did need to. That’s how low she was with herself.”
For years, Schumer’s comedy has poked fun at how Hollywood places near-impossible beauty standards on women, standards that can lead to the kind of body-image issues her character Renee struggles with.
On her Comedy Central show, an Emmy-winning episode parodied 12 Angry Men by having a room of male “jurors” debate whether she’s is hot enough to be on television. In her standup specials, she’s questioned whether men will still want to sleep with her after she’s gained a bit of weight. (Uh, the answer is yes.) She was once planning to star in a Barbie movie, in which the protagonist gets kicked out of Barbieland for not being perfect enough. On Instagram, she received hate mail and yougo-girls for posting a nude photo of herself.
“As someone who has been in the public eye and has got a ton of feedback on my appearance over the years, some people are like: ‘She’s the most repulsive person on Earth,’ and some people say ‘She’s beautiful.’ They’re both right, and neither of those affects how I feel about myself,” Schumer says.
This new movie is both on-brand for Schumer and could be seen as a poor casting choice. To make more of a statement about beauty, the film could have reached miles from the blonde-white-feminine norm.
But no one actor, nor a single movie, can represent everyone. When any character is portrayed as lacking in beauty, it will invite online attacks. At its core, I Feel Pretty is a story of how easily all kinds of insecurities — based on physical appearance, intellect, gender expectations, etc. — can hold any of us back. And how much confidence alone can fix.
Schumer’s answer can be found right in her lap: “Just be comfortable,” she says. “Figure out how to be comfortable.”
Today, for her, that answer is pairing a blazer with sweatpants. Tomorrow it might be something else entirely.