Elisha Cuthbert became a sex symbol in the early 2000s but felt she didn’t have much choice in the matter.
The “24” actress recently joined an episode of Rachel Bilson’s (herself a blossoming female star in the early aughts starring on “The O.C.”) Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson and discussed how she was pressured into appearing in magazines like “FHM” and “Maxim.” At the time these men’s magazines were known for very sexualized photo spreads of female subjects.
“There was really no option back then,” Cuthbert said. “That’s what the [film] studio wanted to you to do.”
Starring in a hit tv series and movies like “The Girl Next Door” kept Cuthbert a regular in the pages of these magazines even garnering her “Maxim”’s title of “most beautiful woman in television” in 2013. She was starring in the sitcom “Happy Endings” at the time.
Cuthbert explained to Bilson these “awards” didn’t and don’t hold any specific relevance to her or her work. “It’s not like I won an Olympic medal. It was just some list some random magazine decided to create,” she said. “They actually don’t mean anything in regards to me as a person or my career.”
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The actress also discussed how pretty much any female star at the time was going to be given this same treatment when posing for a magazine. “Halle Berry was doing it, for God’s sake… Jennifer Aniston was doing it,” she said. We were probably too young to be subjected to that, and feeling pressured to do that.”
While Cuthbert does look back with some disdain for those times, she has has turned those feelings and experiences into fuel to discuss loving oneself with her children, daughter Zaphire, 4, and song Fable, six-months.
“If I can take what I know now about have two children, and going back, I would be so much kinder to myself,” she said. “I got caught up in that wanting to live up to what everyone was expecting of us, which is to be ‘the hottest woman in the world.’ I’m an actress. I’m 5’2” with little legs and height. It was kind of ridiculous.”
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Cuthbert can most recently be see in the 2022 supernatural thriller The Cellar.
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