suits

F ucking, Fat suits.

There’s nothing more irritating than a god damn fat suit.

From Courtney Cox in Friends to the recent Oscar-winning Brendan Fraser in The Whale, I see a thin person wearing a fat suit.

There have been countless times in media where a thin actor has played a fat character by wearing a fat suit, so much so that you have to wonder why they don’t just cast a fat actor and save themselves some money and time. But they don’t. Instead, they use fat suits to increase laughter at the character or promote the tragedy in a fat person’s life.

The suit allows actors to step inside the lives of fat people. They can feel society’s responses and attitudes against them in a safe and simulated environment, which is not granted to people living in their suits 100% of the time. Thus, fat suits illustrate an unrealistic comparison between actors and their characters. The suit’s ability to be thrown away is unfair to fat actors and people who cannot wake up with a new body.

As well as presenting a disillusioned idea of weight loss that impacts the consumer’s mental and physical health.

Monica Gellar in Friends famously wore a fat suit during flashback scenes of the show. Monica’s character is uptight and controlled. Therefore, besides using the suit for comedic relief, it illustrates Monica’s loose and uncontrolled behaviour; thus, feeding into our perception of fatness as a result of uncontrolled behaviour because their lack self-restraint. More recently, Marvel’s Thor wore a fat suit in Avenger’s Endgame, where once again, the suit is used as comedic relief and continues to perpetuate fat tropes. Although Thor’s weight gain feels understandable as he is grieving the loss of his family, it shows audiences that fatness is a tragedy. it does not overshadow the harmful impacts of seeing him on stage versus on screen. To celebrate an actor who won because of heavy prosthetics and CGI when a fat individual could have portrayed the character is significantly telling about the film industry and its relationship with fat communities. The continued use of fat suits exemplifies the misunderstanding and mistreatment that fat people endure. Casting thin actors to play people of a specific group is frustrating and demeaning. The presence of a thin person within these stories, whether for comedic roles or tragic dramas, illustrates the distrust and discrimination the media has for fat people. Fat suits are a symptom of an embedded Fatphobia that everyone and the industry need to demolish.

A concept fully felt in the 2022 film, The Whale. Daren Aronofsky’s film shows the true tragedy of life: being fat. The film presents fatness as humanity’s greatest failure. In 2023 it feels like a step backward to honour a film that demeans fat people’s lives. However much love there is for Brendan Fraser’s climatic return to cinema, him on stage versus on screen.