Beauty
Chloë Grace Moretz Says ‘Cruel’ Viral ‘Family Guy’ Meme Of Herself Turned Her Into A Recluse
“Everyone was making fun of my body.”
Chloë Grace Moretz opened up about how she felt her life changed since that “Family Guy” meme. The 25-year-old shared that it was a “horrific” edit that turned her into a “recluse.”
She experienced body dysmorphic disorder and never liked the “joke” that kept making the rounds on the internet.
She told Hunger magazine, “There was one meme that really affected me, of me walking into a hotel with a pizza box in my hand.”
She went on to talk about how “this photo got manipulated into a character from ‘Family Guy’ with the long legs and the short torso.” Moretz continued, “And it was one of the most widespread memes at the time.
It was a picture of her carrying two boxes of pizza in the city while wearing simple casual wear with a black shirt and black shorts. But the paparazzi shot was later edited and made her upper body shorter and her legs longer. People then compare her snap to the “Family Guy” character, Griffin, with the Legs Go All the Way Up.
“Everyone was making fun of my body, and I brought it up with someone, and they were like, ‘Oh, shut the f**k up, it’s funny,’” she continued. And that was how she got body dysmorphia, which she “actually never really talked about.”
“I just remember sitting there and thinking, ‘My body is being used as a joke, and it’s something that I can’t change about who I am, and it is being posted all over Instagram.’ I basically became a recluse.”
“To this day, when I see that meme, it’s something very hard for me to overcome.”
She continued to say that being alone had made her feel better because it was one of the few times she could be “away from the photographers” and “be myself.” She added that she’s had “many experiences that people didn’t photograph.”
“But at the same time, it made me severely anxious when I was photographed. My heart rate would rise, and I would hyperventilate.”
She’s sad that the experience left her unable to enjoy the experience of being in the spotlight. She said, “It took a layer of something that I used to enjoy, which was getting dressed up and going to a carpet and taking a photo, and made me super self-conscious.”
“I think that body dysmorphia — which we all deal with in this world — is extrapolated by the issues of social media. It’s a headf**k.”
The drastic change that came with Covid-19 gave her a chance to stay away from the public for a long time. She’s also gone through therapies that helped mitigate her dysmorphia.
“To say that these past two years have been transformative is an understatement, to say the least. I’m a very different girl than I was. I feel like a woman now.”
