ON THE ROAD
Radio presenter, TV star and champion of all women Jameela Jamil on life in Hollywood
Jameela Jamil might be the only person who didn’t move to LA to become an actor. Instead, she says the driving force was simply ‘to kind of start again, because I’d really just fucked up my 20s’. That may sound hard to believe, seeing as she’s now the breakout star of NBC’S hit The Good Place (the bizarre but brilliant sitcom about the afterlife, co-starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell), but also because the Jamil most of us know is the wisecracking, utterly striking T4 presenter and then Radio 1 chart show host, who has always been successful, beautiful and winning at life. But, of course, it’s never how it looks from the outside. ‘I was a mess in my 20s,’ she says, collapsing into a rattan sofa on the terrace at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont (the fact that she suggests we meet here – the iconic celebrity hotspot – is the only cliché I will unearth today. Otherwise, she’s possibly the most original, unconventional and agenda-setting person I’ve ever interviewed). ‘I was anxious and depressed and just so far from who I am. On the outside, I was projecting this image of this T4 “it” girl who was Djing at parties. But really, I would just turn up, not talk to anyone, have some photos taken and then get back into my bed with my five bags of Haribo. I wasn’t being honest with myself. Instead, I was being who everyone else was telling me I should be – like so many women do. You get given the role and you’re scared it’s going to be taken away from you, so you do as you’re told. But I just needed to stop. I didn’t come here to become an actress – I came here to just stop.’ ‘Here’, is now just down the road, where she shares an apartment with her boyfriend of four years, British musician James Blake. They happened to move to the States around the same time and ‘hugely, accidentally, fell in love’, so Jamil spontaneously joined Blake on a world tour for the next 12 months. She says that when they’re together ‘we are just whoever we were when we were teenagers’, but admits that she had never wanted to date a musician. ‘I met so many ego-maniacs in my time at T4 and Radio 1 who are in this industry, and to find like a really good egg, who was well raised and doesn’t think that he’s God’s gift to earth, is really cool.’ Blake makes her coffee every morning (she makes him breakfast in return), and is also her own personal cheerleader. ‘He’s taught me how to believe in myself – he’s infected me with his white, male privilege,’ Jamil laughs. ‘Whenever I’ve said I can’t do something, he looks at me like I’m crazy.’ One of the crazy moments might have been playing Tahani Al-jamil in The Good Place. She heard about the role after she signed with Amy Poehler’s manager, to work together on a script she’d been writing. ‘The audition came up and he said, “It’s an annoying, overly tall English woman – it’s basically you!” I felt very calm and carefree during the audition because it was just so ridiculous an idea that I would ever become an actor. I guess because I was so relaxed I was
‘I WASN’T BEING HONEST. I WAS BEING WHO PEOPLE WANTED ME TO BE’
able to be myself, and that happened to be what [producer] Mike Schur was looking for.’
Three seasons later and it’s clear Jamil has finally found her own good place, both in body and mind. ‘Figuring out that I’m not going to figure it out has been the biggest and most liberating revelation of my life,’ she says with a shrug. ‘That, and not trying to be perfect any more.’
It’s probably time for a disclaimer here. There is definitely a lot that’s nearing perfect about Jamil: she’s excellent company – wickedly funny, smart and down to earth. Her humour borders on bawdy a lot of the time (she says, ‘I love an epic fuck-up – even more so when it’s mine. I’m just willing to be embarrassed’) and I wonder if she’s developed this self-deprecation in direct response to how striking she looks – as if she’s hoping that one cancels out the other. She tells me, ‘I’ve been a loser much longer than I’ve been perceived to be cool,’ but she also arrives at the hotel in a head-turning cropped blazer, even shorter shorts and ankle boots, and is easily the coolest woman in the entire place.
I don’t believe it was always thus, though. Jamil’s confidence has been hard-won. When she reflects on her 32 years, it seems a wonder that she’s quite so well-adjusted. She was born with labyrinthitis (an inflammation of the inner ear) and spent much of her childhood unable to hear and enduring a series of operations. Already painfully shy, things didn’t improve at her private all-girls school in London, where she was bullied mercilessly ‘because I used to try so hard. I was on a full scholarship, so if I didn’t get As, I’d lose my schooling’, but also because she was of Pakistani and Indian descent in a predominantly white establishment and, at already 5ft 10in, ‘wore braces and was covered in acne’. By the time she was 14, she had become so severely anorexic that she stopped having periods. Her salvation, if you can truly call it that, was a road accident at the age of 17, which damaged her spine so badly that she was left bedridden for the next two years. She started to eat again, but wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to walk again. I ask if she felt, in that moment, like her life had ended? ‘I was a miserable teenager. I had such severe anorexia and I was so lonely and depressed that I don’t think I really cared,’ she admits quietly.
‘My family was going through a terrible time themselves, so it was impossible for them, too. In the end, I really did have to look to comedy to get me through it.’
The comedy came in the shape of American sitcoms – Cheers, Friends, Frasier – which, she suggests, ‘taught me how to act and host TV, because I was ingesting it, via osmosis, 24 hours a day’.
The accident shaped her profoundly (‘There’s something about walking down the street, being hit by a car and not walking again for two years that really takes your faith out of knowing what is going to happen next’), but so did Yes Man by Danny Wallace, in which the author says ‘yes’ to every opportunity that comes his way. ‘I read it when I was about 19 or 20 and since then I’ve said yes to becoming a TV presenter when I was a little scared English teacher; then I said yes to becoming a radio DJ when I had no idea what I was doing; then to jumping on a tour bus around the world with a man I barely knew; and now to becoming an actress with Ted Danson. I just became open to being embarrassed and looking ignorant and getting things wrong. I started seeing the beauty in trying, rather than just the beauty in winning.’
Yes, back to the beauty. Jamil’s relationship with her appearance
‘I STARTED TO SEE THE BEAUTY IN TRYING RATHER THAN IN WINNING’
seems as fraught and character-forming as anything else she’s experienced. A decade after the bullying, and a few years after her battle with anorexia, Jamil found herself – perhaps to her surprise – to be the tabloids’ darling, thanks to her T4 presenting gig. But the attention turned nasty again when, at the height of her fame, she was prescribed steroids for her asthma and gained a lot weight – unflattering photos were then plastered all over the papers (‘I wasn’t aware of how bad fat-shaming was until it happened to me,’ she admits).
Jamil says the underlying thread in all this – the thing that’s screwed her up most of all – is ‘the constant toxicity of our society, our culture and our media. I was so affected by this stuff when I was younger. I really believed everything I would read. Actresses in magazines with their “thinspiration” tips, famous women who would eat in front of the mirror, naked, to make sure they didn’t overeat. I was 14 or 15 reading these things and it just messed me up. The Photoshop messed me up – it made me think that I was a freak because I had stretch marks and acne and a bit of fat on my upper arms. I would always think about what’s wrong with me, never what’s right with me. It was just so sad.’
And now? ‘I still suffer from body dysmorphia,’ she admits. ‘I can’t get rid of it. Something’s wrong with my brain and I will rally against it for ever. I don’t weigh myself any more, and I sort of judge my size on how my clothes fit, because I know that I’ll never be able to see myself properly. When I first started out in this industry, I didn’t know I was allowed to say no to airbrushing. I was given a whiter face, a little English nose and perfect skinny thighs. It makes me feel gross. I’m sorry to anyone who ever saw pictures of me like that and wanted to be thin like me.’
Now Jamil has come out fighting. The final straw was a photo of the Kardashian sisters she spotted on Instagram last spring, with numbers scrawled over their bodies. ‘They are all worth hundreds of millions each and have created these huge empires, so I assumed the numbers were their net worth, but it was their weight in pounds and kilos,’ she recalls, still in disbelief. ‘This is still the only way we know how to measure the worth of women: a weighing scale. This is how much respect we give them.’
In response, Jamil started her own Instagram account called i_weigh. With 250,000 followers and counting, it’s a movement to encourage people to recognise their value is more than just their appearance or weight. A combination of warrior-cry quotes (‘You are absolutely gorgeous, and that’s the least interesting thing about you’) and reposted photos of followers emblazoned with the other qualities that add to their value (‘Friend/daughter/book lover/cancer survivor/future teacher/feminist’), Jamil says she now gets hundreds of messages a day – ‘stories of little mini rebellions that people have, such as: “I’ve worn a bathing suit for the first time for 10 years”’ and that i_weigh is the best thing that’s ever happened to her. ‘It’s the thing that’s healed me the most. The incredible women and men who have supported each other and stood up for themselves have encouraged me to stand up for myself, too.’
For Jamil – still a newbie in Hollywood – that means making the bold move of having ‘no airbrushing’ written into her contract. I suggest that, while it’s pretty bloody brilliant, she may be alone in her crusade (most actors still request the opposite). ‘Maybe they’re waiting to see if I die on my arse, so I’ve got to really try not to die on my arse,’ she laughs. ‘I’m not the only one. Lena Waithe was unedited on the cover of Vanity
Fair recently. I have to put my money where my mouth is – I don’t use filters on Instagram any more, and I make a point of pointing out my cellulite or my stretch marks and owning them as part of myself. Someone’s got to call bullshit, and if it costs me my career, then so be it. But I don’t want to be complicit in the death of women’s self-worth, self-love and self-respect.’ I suggest that people might think it’s easy for someone who looks like she does to take this stand (the unretouched images on these pages speak for themselves) and she counters, ‘Fair enough, I am a slim actress and fair enough I have lighter-skin privilege than someone with darker skin than me, but it’s a start. Let me open the door for other people, let me wake everyone up to how ridiculous this is.’
Alongside i_weigh and The Good Place, Jamil is also working on a screenplay (‘a female-led comedy about intimacy. Not sex, actual emotional intimacy’) and a book. ‘It’s everything I’ve learnt about shame, in anecdotal form, because it’s the disease that’s taking women down the fastest. I wanted to write a book that helps you identify it and break it down. If I’d read something like this when I was younger, I might have had a slightly easier go of things. I didn’t know anything about consent or how to protect myself as a young woman, then I found myself, age 22, being sexually assaulted. It was the end of a date and I was raped by someone that I had met very briefly before then. I didn’t know who to turn to, or how to feel about it. I just felt like it was my fault somehow. So, I want to arm young people with information – what I’ve learnt – that no one ever told me.’
Some people might reflect on Jamil’s life and see her as fragile or a victim, but in person, her passion, fury, fearlessness and strength are intoxicating. And I suppose her point is that we are all victims, one way or another, because we all feel pressure to conform to the same patriarchal narrative. Jamil and I talk for a couple of hours (I find it hard to drag myself away from her and, unlike most celebrities, she’s unencumbered by a clock-watching publicist) and I then spend the rest of the evening debating her opinions and agenda with the Red team.
The next day, on our cover shoot, she’s equally as compelling and charismatic – entertaining the crew with slapstick humour one minute and ranting about the midterm elections the next. At one point, between shots on the beach, she stops to hug me and says, ‘I’m so honoured that you would put me on your cover. Hopefully it will mean something to little Indian and Pakistani girls and girls of colour. When they look at the magazine, I think they’ll super-appreciate it.’
As I fly back to London, one comment from Jamil stays with me for longer than the rest: ‘We undermine women constantly with statistics that have nothing to do with who they are or what they do or what they contribute to society. We are allowed to be proud of ourselves and we are allowed to be grateful and we are allowed to be content with ourselves, damn it.’
‘I DON’T WANT TO BE COMPLICIT IN THE DEATH OF WOMEN’S SELF-WORTH’