Alicia Silverstone is recalling a “horrendous” experience she had with paparazzi when she was a young adult.
Silverstone, 48, opened up about the intense scrutiny she received from tabloids while filming Batman & Robin in 1997 during her Monday, September 8, appearance on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“I was running through the airport,” Silverstone, who was around 20 years old when she was tapped to play Batgirl in the film, said. The movie came two years after her role as Cher Horowitz in Clueless shot her to stardom.
The Crush actress recalled “hiding” in “a little square box” in the airport while paparazzi shouted at her, mostly calling her by the nickname “Fatgirl.”
“It’s clever,” she conceded. “Do you know what I would say back? … I mean, in my head because I didn’t want to talk to them. [I would say,] ‘How do you go home at night and speak to your children?’ Like [if] your daughter is a huge fan of mine. Tell her, ‘Oh, I told the person you love and admire that she’s fat today.’ Does that feel good?”
Silverstone continued, “And also, what does that tell your daughter that she’s supposed to be? ‘Cause if this body is not OK, then what body is OK?”
She concluded, “It was really intense and it sucked. … It definitely had its effects for sure.”
Silverstone previously opened up about being body-shamed by paparazzi and tabloids while filming Batman & Robin in a 2020 interview with The Guardian.
“They would make fun of my body when I was younger,” she said, revealing that a journalist even once asked for her bra size. “It was hurtful, but I knew they were wrong. I wasn’t confused. I knew that it was not right to make fun of someone’s body shape, that doesn’t seem like the right thing to be doing to a human.”
Silverstone continued, “That definitely wasn’t my favorite filmmaking experience. There were working circumstances that were less than favorable in terms of how things went down.”
The Irish Blood star also opened up about what she learned from the experience.
“I didn’t say ‘f*** you’ and come out like a warrior, but I would just walk away and go, ‘OK, I know what that is and I’m done, I’m not going near that again,’” she said.
Silverstone has since changed her perspective on reacting to criticism. In 2022, she shared a screenshot of a throwback photo labeled “Alicia Silverstone Candid Fat Photo.” Silverstone gave the camera the middle finger as Gayle’s song “ABCDEFU” played over the clip.
“Damn. I think I look good 😂🤷🏼♀️,” the Clueless star wrote in the caption.
Though Silverstone “stopped loving acting for a very long time” after Batman & Robin, she told The Guardian that she was later reinvigorated by a role in a David Mamet play and started to only take on roles she believed in.
“My body was just like, this is what I’m meant to do, I love it so much, I need to find a way to do both, to be able to be an actress and be an activist at the same time so that’s what I did,” Silverstone added.
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