Wayne Knight has claimed his 110-pound weight loss has negatively impacted his career.
The 69-year-old actor, best known for his role as Newman on the hit 1990s sitcom series Seinfeld, briefly opened up about the connection between his physical change and his current lack of work during a run-in with TMZ at Los Angeles International Airport.
When asked by the outlet if his weight loss has affected his career, Knight said: “Yes.”
“In a bad way,” he continued. “But it takes time. It takes time for people to accept you as you are, and then they find out whether or not you can still do things without being fat.”
Knight added: “It’s just what it is. You just have to accept the fact that you can’t sell something that you’re not.”
According to the actor, he’s lost 110 pounds since he starred in 1993’s Jurassic Park. He didn’t specify what method he used to shed the pounds, but said he’d tried “everything that anyone could ever try” over a period of time — including therapy, drugs, surgery, exercise, and radiation.
Knight also joked that he’d been “taken by aliens” as a method for weight loss.
When TMZ questioned whether Knight had been doing it “the old fashioned way,” he responded: “What do you mean, like, not eating? Yes, that does work.”
Knight’s career has spanned decades, with a portfolio of supporting roles in movies such as Basic Instinct, Space Jam, and The Exes. He also assumed the role of postal worker Newman alongside Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Seinfeld.
In 2020, Knight reprised his series character in an anti-Donald Trump advertisement. The commercial, written and created by Seinfeld’s David Mandel, was in support of mail-in voting for the Democratic political action committee Pacronym.
In the ad, titled “A Message from Your Friendly Local Mail Carrier,” Knight condemned the “systematic, premeditated assault on the U.S. mail by President Trump and his so-called Postmaster General.”
“That guy’s never even licked a stamp,” he said, referring to President-elect Trump. “They’ve had the unmitigated gall to try to slow down the mail, when everybody knows that the only person who can slow down the mail is a mailman.
“When the mail stops, the world stops,” Knight continued, urging viewers to take necessary steps to ensure their vote is cast on time. “Alright Donnie, you know those tax returns? The ones you don’t want anyone seeing? You should never have mailed those.”
