‘I’m a Feministin-progress’
Jameela Jamil, star of The Good Place, tells Ellie Austin why she is campaigning against female body-shaming
Jameela Jamil was on set in Los Angeles a few weeks ago when she glanced at her phone during a break from filming to see that she had three missed calls. When it rang for a fourth time, she picked it up. On the line was the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, who was calling to tell Jamil that she’d chosen her as one of 15 women to appear on the cover of the British Vogue issue she was guest-editing.
“Edward [Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue] had asked me to be part of his Forces for Change issue a while ago and we’d done the photoshoot under wraps in May but I had no idea that Meghan was the guest editor until that call,” says Jamil, almost breathless with excitement. “She is the ultimate change-maker and rule-breaker and I am in awe of her.”
During their five-minute conversation, the duchess congratulated Jamil on her work as an advocate for body positivity. “She said how invested she was in the subjects I talk about and how she follows what I’m doing on social media. I knew that she and Harry had highlighted my work on Instagram in the past but you never know whether it’s actually them [or people who work for them].”
Jamil had already written an opinion piece for the issue, which also features the climate-change activist Greta Thunberg, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. However, she was unaware of
who would be giving her article the final sign-off. “I used some pretty blunt language, but the duchess said she had personally okayed it. She’s so cool. This cover proves that Meghan isn’t in this for the glory. She’s being bold and using her privilege to pass the mic on to other women.” Not that Jamil, 33, needs the help of a duchess for her voice to be heard. Over the past 18 months, she has become one of the internet’s most prominent activists, holding both companies and celebrities to account for glamorising thinness, “weaponising” airbrushing against women and promoting dangerously narrow ideals of beauty. Jamil’s toolkit consists of viral tweets, provocative soundbites and impassioned Instagram posts that draw on her own experience of mental illness, discrimination and abuse.
It’s hard to believe that everything Jamil has endured over the past three decades could happen to one person. She was 14 when she became anorexic, 17 when she was struck by a car so badly that she was bed-bound for a year, 22 when she was dateraped and 26 when she had a nervous breakdown. There were other traumas along the way: numerous sexual assaults, repeated surgery to correct the congenital hearing loss she was born with, racist beatings and a breast cancer scare in her late-20s, while she was working as a DJ at BBC Radio 1. For most people, any one of these events would be lifealtering but Jamil reels them off with the emotional detachment of someone reciting their weekend to-do list.
This is, she explains enthusiastically, thanks to eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), an increasingly popular treatment for trauma that involves tracking a flashing light
back and forth with your eye while thinking of a particularly distressing memory. Jamil gave it a shot a few years ago before leaving London for America and felt painful recollections from her past evaporate in what seemed like a matter of hours.
“For a long time I had severe PTSD,” she says. “EMDR pretty much used a magic trick. It removed my trauma. I can remember horrific things and feel like they happened to other people. I couldn’t have kept myself together without it.”
As a result of the therapy, Jamil now feels able to talk about her past as part of her activism. “I don’t use my trauma unless I feel it’s necessary to bring context to my opinion,” she says with the authority of someone used to defending herself. “I left school at 16, so I don’t have credentials, just the life I managed to survive.”
It was her eating disorder (“I was existing on 300 calories a day and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to be thin”) that made her particularly alert to society’s obsession with how much women weigh. Scrolling through Instagram last year, she landed on a photo of the Kardashians with their respective weights emblazoned across their chests. Incensed, Jamil asked women to send her unfiltered selfies, labelled not with their weight, but with a list of the achievements and relationships they were proud of. This marked the start of “I Weigh”, an Instagrambased body-positivity movement that Jamil is now turning into a company aiming to help “young people [become] smarter and happier, not thinner and younger”. Since its launch, she has refused to be airbrushed in photoshoots.
“I would feel very guilty being in an industry that is destroying the mental health of so many young people if I wasn’t whistleblowing all the nonsense,” she says. “I’ve been used as a vessel to make other people feel bad about themselves in the past. I’ve been airbrushed and thinned out and told not to tell my secrets.”
We’re talking on Skype after two failed attempts to meet in person. The first time, I flew to LA to meet Jamil for lunch, only to be struck down by a bug that left me unable to leave my hotel room. Jamil sweetly emailed me tips for recovery via her publicist, including a recommendation for charcoal tablets to settle my stomach (so LA). We rescheduled for a few weeks later, when Jamil planned to be in New York to speak at a festival but the event was cancelled when temperature hit 40C and a citywide “heat emergency” was declared.
As a result, Jamil, now a household name in America for her role in the smash-hit NBC sitcom The Good Place, makes time for our chat on a rare day off. “I’m so tired,” she yawns, sitting on the floor of her unshowy West Hollywood
I have a huge Instagram following. Can you imagine how much I would make from selling toxic s*** to young people on Instagram? Honestly, I’ve probably lost millions over the past few years from having principles.