Harry Potter star Jessie Cave revealed that after her debut in The Half-Blood Prince as Lavender Brown, Ron Weasley’s first girlfriend and a member of Dumbledore’s Army, she was treated “as a different species” because of weight gain and how she didn’t “starve herself.”
“I gained a lot of weight after doing Harry Potter, just because I wasn’t starving myself,” Cave recalled an interview with The Independent.
“I definitely felt invisible when I gained a little bit of weight. And since then, it’s made me have weird issues with weight and work. And it’s so f–ked up, but it’s just how it is. Women have to deal with that all the time,” She highlighted the weight obsession of acting industry. “It’s the most toxic relationship, acting. Unless you’re doing well, you’re only being rejected […] I definitely went crazy in my early twenties, thinking, ‘But they said they liked me and that I was perfect for it?’ But then you realise there’s 100 other girls who are as good as you if not better, maybe prettier, maybe thinner, and they’re perfect for it,” she further added.
According to The Independent, Cave struggled with body images long before starring in Harry Potter. The article stated that Cave’s “formative blueprint for womanhood was Friends, so like many of us, she looked at Rachel, Monica and Phoebe’s rail-thin frames and saw what she should be.”
“They were so thin. And for years I put it down to, ‘Oh they must be naturally small, they’re just lucky.’ And now it’s obvious that they were just so starved,” Cave remarked about her own co-stars.
Jessie is now a mother of three and a published author. Her debut adult novel Sunset was released on June 24. Although her body image issues affected Cave’s perception of herself, she tried to think of her experience in a positive manner. “If I’d stayed thin – unnaturally thin, unhappily thin – I would have probably got more acting roles, and then I wouldn’t have started writing. And then I don’t know who I would be now because writing is who I am. I’m almost grateful that I gained all that weight.”