Kat Dennings has revealed the cruel comments she faced about her appearance at the start of her acting career.
The 2 Broke Girls star, 38, landed a role in an episode of Sex and The City when she was just 14 – despite being told in previous auditions she was “too fat” for television.
Dennings began her on screen career - appearing in adverts - at the age of nine and received some “extremely negative feedback” from casting directors via her agent.
Speaking to People, the Shifting Gears actor said: “It was pretty crazy thinking about it. I’m like: "How can anyone say that about a little kid? This is insane.”
Detailing the remarks, she explained: “I was 12. I’d go into an audition and I’d do it, and my manager would call me and I’d be like: "How’d it go?" And they’d be like: ‘Well, they thought you weren’t pretty enough and you’re fat.’
“The time that I was auditioning and starting to act, it was a very different environment than it is now,” Dennings reflected.
“There was not a lot of inclusivity at all. It was very harsh. There was a lot of extremely negative feedback and people would not hold back,” the star said.
Dennings, who went on to front her own sitcom, 2 Broke Girls, alongside Beth Behrs from 2011 to 2017, said she managed to retain her “strong mindset” despite the negative comments.
“For some reason, it didn’t break my spirit,” she said. “I was like: ‘I’ll show them.’ I guess props to my parents, because they were like: ‘They’re idiots. Don’t listen to them.’ And I was like: ‘They’re idiots, I’m not.’”
The 38-year-old actor revealed she thinks the entertainment industry is “much softer” and “kinder” today than the “completely insane” showbiz landscape she faced as a child.
“Theresbody positivity, there’s inclusivity, there’s representation, and there was none of that before. It was really gross,” she said.
Dennings landed her role in the Sex And The City episode “Hot Child in the City” in 2000, in which she played a spoiled rich kid who hires Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) to play her bat mitzvah party.
Eleven years later, Sex and The City showrunner Michael Patrick King and comedian Whitney Cummings cast Dennings in 2 Broke Girls, which followed two waitresses from different backgrounds working in a diner.
Reflecting on the audition that changed the course of her career, Dennings said in a recent interview with The View: “It was very interesting because, of course, I wasn’t allowed to watch Sex and The City as a child and we didn’t have cable even, our family, so, I really had no idea what the show was.”
She added: “I auditioned for it. I was like, ‘What a weird show. What a weird title. And then on the way home, on the train, we saw a building — like, a Sex and The City billboard across the whole building.”
