Here's One Theory on Why Comedy Movies Stopped Using Fat Suits

On this week’s episode of Stavros Halkias’s podcast, Stavvy’s World, writer Demi Adejuyigbe, best known for his work on The Good Place and The Late Late Show with James Corden,  discussed the aggressively early aughts film Shallow Hal. The premise is that Hal (Jack Black) is obsessed with dating women who fit a very specific physical mold and then hypnotized to see the inner beauty of everyone he sees. 

This causes Hal to fall in love with Rosemary (Gwenyth Paltrow). Hal sees Rosemary as Paltrow appears in real life; but to everyone else she has a much larger stature. Released in 2001, basically 90 percent of the movie’s punchlines were fatphobic. 

Halkias and Adejuyigbe ruminated on the plot machinations of Shallow Hal. “There's a scene where like he has his power and goes to like this burn ward full of children who have been like horrifically burned and he sees them all and then he's like oh they look great like these are such nice kids. Why are they here? And then he realized he's in the burn ward and it's like, oh, they're all actually ugly,” Adejuyigbe recalled from the film. 

“At some point in this movie someone should have just been like does that work?” Adejuyigbe continued. 

But the real questionable cinematic decision was putting Gwyneth Paltrow into a fat suit. 

“Why would you make that choice?” Halkias questioned. “Did they put her in a fat suit or was it CGI?”

“This is 2001. So, it's like 9/11 really reset a lot of stuff for us culturally,” Halkias continued, shocked by the egregiously offensive portrayal of plus-sized women in Shallow Hal. “This shit was not happening post 911. They're like no frivolous shit.”

That quickly snowballed into a larger theory about why there are far fewer fat suits worn in movies these days. Maybe, like Ellen stepping down from her own talk show, we can somehow trace the end of the fat suit to 9/11. 

“9/11 happened, Jack Black was like, ‘We got to respect our women, man. What are we doing to our beautiful queens?’” Adejuyigbe added. “The worst thing is I don't think that I think we're like five years away from this kind of thing coming back in a way that we don't really see until we're then 20 years out.”

Unfortunately, this theory is overlooking one crucial fact: we never really stopped making movies and television where thin actors wore fat suits: there’s Chris Hemsworth in Avengers: Endgame, and Renée Zellweger in The Thing About Pam as two more recent examples. It certainly is less common now; and the prosthetics are less outrageous. 

At least it’s reasonable that a movie as outright frivolous as Shallow Hal would not get made in a post-9/11 world. (Don’t Google “Just Friends starring Ryan Reynolds.”)