For the past two years, most of us haven’t been able to escape conversations about Ozempic, the diabetes drug that celebrities, socialites, and regular people are taking to lose weight. But somehow, one very famous woman missed all the fuss.
“I actually don’t know what Ozempic is,” Kate Winslet told The New York Times Magazine in a new profile. “All I know is that it’s some pill that people are taking or something like that.” After writer Susan Dominus explained to Winslet that the medication is an injectable drug that millions of Americans are taking to suppress their appetites, Winslet said, “Oh my God. This sounds terrible. Let’s eat some more things!” According to Dominus, she also “made a show” out of eating more of the pastry she was holding.
Winslet has often talked about the pressure to be thin in Hollywood and the toll it has taken on her. In 2022, she told The Sunday Times that when she was younger, she was informed that she would have to settle for “fat-girl roles.” In 2021, she told The Guardian that tabloids had been “straight-up cruel” about her weight at the start of her career. “They would comment on my size, they’d estimate what I weighed, they’d print the supposed diet I was on. It was critical and horrible and so upsetting to read,” she said.
When talking to the Times, Winslet revealed that she had an eating disorder when she was younger but never told anyone about it. “Because guess what,” she said, “people in the world around you go, ‘Hey, you look great! You lost weight!’ So even the compliment about looking good is connected to weight.” In fact, she said, weight is the one thing she won’t let people talk to her about about. “If they do, I pull them up straightaway,” she said. Hopefully, Winslet will employ a similar tactic the next time someone tries to explain Ozempic to her.