Why Are We Still Using Fat Suits?

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Hi, this is Willa.

Before we start, this episode contains some adult language.

In the late 90s and early aughts, Katie Shepard, one of Dakota Ring's producers, was a teenager.

Specifically, I was a fat teenager.

Even more specifically, a fat teenage girl.

Not that anyone used the word fat to Katie's face.

Don't get me wrong, people could be mean.

I got the worst of it from my grandmother who'd purposefully buy me pants two sizes too small.

But most of the time, people would just say things like, I was a big girl.

But on TV and in the movies, well, fat was another story.

Some girl ate Monica.

There was fat Monica on Friends.

Shut up.

The camera adds 10 pounds.

Huh, so how many cameras are actually on you?

There was the horny, grotesque, fat bastard in Austin Powers.

Come here, I'm gonna eat you.

I'm bigger than you.

I'm higher in the food chain.

Get in my belly.

And there were all of the fat characters Eddie Murphy played in the Nutty Professor movies.

You know where that come from?

Wasn't that damn TV?

Every time you turn it on, they got somebody in there talking about lose weight, get healthy, get in shape.

I guess you could say these roles and many others like them brought fatness to the forefront.

But from Courtney Cox to Mike Myers to Eddie Murphy, the people playing these roles weren't fat themselves.

I wasn't really watching fatness on screen.

I was watching the puppet version of fatness.

I was watching the fat suit.

I don't know why everybody trying to lose weight in the first place.

Ain't nobody supposed to be the same size.

We're supposed to be all different.

I see more fat actors on screen today than when I was a teenager, but there are still a lot of fat suits.

And so just like when I was a teenager, I find myself wondering, what's the deal with all the fake fat people?

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Katie Shepard.

A fat suit is a custom-made costume with one goal.

To make an actor appear fat without them actually having to be fat.

It's typically a unitard filled with foam and other wiggly jiggly bits, but it's also so much more than that.

An embodiment of all of our cultural hang-ups about fatness.

In today's episode, we're going to consider the fat suit from all angles.

How it's made, how it's changed, and why it continues to exist.

So today on Dakota Ring,

why can't we ditch the fat suit?

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I've spent an unfortunate amount of time in my life being shown ways to lose fat, from workouts to meal plans to supplements.

But Don Deininger teaches a class on how to put on fat.

So I took the belly.

I just kind of held it up to the body form.

Kind of drew a circle real fast and then made it nice and symmetrical once I got it down.

This is her class from the Stan Winston School on how to make a fat suit.

And if you don't cut something out right the first time, you can just always keep adding to it.

That's the nice thing.

You can glue it together, you can sew it.

Donna's helped build creatures for projects like the shape of water and the Mandalorian, but she's also worked on several fat suits.

She explained to me there are a number of specialists involved in making even just one.

The people who ran the silicone, the people who made the mold, the people who sculpt it, the people who paint it, the fabricators.

Like, there's a whole village it takes to make a suit.

It's kind of crazy.

Dawn's a fabricator herself.

That's the person who makes the bodysuit element of a costume.

She told me her first fat suit was for Keenan Thompson in Fat Albert.

He's not a thin guy, but he wasn't big enough to be Fat Albert.

Every fat suit is built on a base layer, an undersuit that fits the actor.

And that's almost like a spandex unitard.

And then I have to cut out all these muscles.

But then sometimes you need something to like have a little movement.

So like Fat Albert's belly.

So then you'll have different types of little pellets.

You might make in like almost like a moon-shaped spandex bag.

Styrofoam pellets and spandex are just some of the materials used on the suit.

You'll use batting, which is what they use in quilts.

And we have like mattress foam.

I happen to have mattress foam here because I was making some cushions.

And so you just cut your shapes out of here.

It's wild to me that the fat suit is basically the same cushion that I put my butt on to eat dinner with.

Yeah.

Everything changes all the time too.

Like the materials, like, oh, this is better now than this.

Everything's always evolving and every job is different.

different.

The fat suit we see on screen is an intricate and complex piece of modern equipment, but one that avails itself of everyday materials.

And that's something, it turns out, the fat suit has been doing for hundreds of years.

But it wouldn't have been called that.

Roy Sbest is a lecturer at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, who researches disability in the work of William Shakespeare.

Usually the word that was used was bombast.

It's used in elite and noble fashion in the 16th and 17th centuries in England.

You know, sometimes you'll see like a kind of like a skirt piece that's stuffed with cotton and sawdust and what was called at the time bombast.

Royce believes bombast would have been worn by actors playing Shakespeare's most famous explicitly fat character, the merry vain knight, Sir John Falstaff, played here by Orson Welles.

A goodly portly man, a face of a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.

So many of the jokes at Falstaff's expense have to do with bombast.

There's lots of references to Falstaff being made of nothing but bombast.

If you break his body apart, there's nothing else there.

Falstaff's fatness is a kind of visual metaphor, all tied up with his vitality, his desires, his excess, qualities that make him the comic relief, a character you laugh with and at.

In the centuries that followed, fat characters continued to occupy this ambiguous space.

Audiences were encouraged to mock them and enjoy them.

Sometimes fatness was even seen as admirable, a sign of wealth and power and plenty.

Really, that started to change by the end of the 19th century.

Fatness really starts to be denigrated.

Amy Farrell is a professor at Dickinson College and the author of the book Fat Shame.

She says the shift came when bogus race science began to take hold in the 1800s.

And with that came new attitudes about what a so-called superior human looked like.

Fatness became a marker of an inferior body, of one that was out of control, one that was less civilized, and was really connected to race as well.

So the dark skin was connected inferior to the white skin, but body size was as well.

Thinness was the sign that you had control over your body.

And by having control over your body, your mind could flourish.

Amy found that when thinness started to be thought of as a virtue unto itself, fatness became a failing.

And you can already see that in magazines from the 19th century, which were filled with cartoons mocking fat people.

Not just as being this kind of butt of a joke because they broke a chair or did something like that, but actually as being represented as being incapable of functioning in a modern world.

In the 20th century, these jokes burst onto movie screens.

There's a short silent movie from 1905 called Airy Fairy Lillian Tries on Her New Corset, and it's exactly what it sounds like.

A fat woman tries to put on her corset and she can't do it.

She gets a man to help her who collapses from the effort.

So from the beginning, the fat joke was built into Hollywood's sensibility.

But Airy Fairy Lillian seems to have been played by an actual fat person.

Stars like Oliver Hardy and Fatty Arbuckle were actually fat too.

So how then did we get from them to fat bastard?

Listen, Missy,

do you fancy another go?

Because once you've had fat, you never go back.

Well, that's thanks to the magic of prosthetic makeup.

It's a lie.

It's a lie.

It's a liar.

By the 1930s, makeup artists devised ingenious ways to craft terrifying creatures like Frankenstein by applying cotton and collodion, a liquid plastic, to an actor's face.

And they quickly realized the techniques could be used for more than monsters.

When 25-year-old Orson Welles was making Citizen Kane, he needed his character to grow old over the course of the movie.

So he turned to a makeup artist who made a cast of his head.

These casts allowed artists to create prosthetics, saving hours in the makeup chair.

But in the 1960s, when a much older Orson Welles played Shakespeare's Falstaff, like you heard earlier, and had to play a fat person, he was still just putting on what amounted to, basically, bombast, as he explained on the Dean Martin show.

This is padding.

It's always gratifying to have to put on a few

phony pounds for us chubby tragedians.

By the 1970s and 80s, though, special effects techniques in makeup got more advanced in a hurry, thanks to movies like The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in London.

In the years that followed, makeup artists realized the same skills used to turn actors into werewolves and demonically possessed children could also make them look fat.

They honed those skills until the fat suit became a work of art.

Hello!

Oh, I'm sorry to frighten you.

Dear, I must look like a Yeti in this getup.

In 1994, Mrs.

Doubtfire won an Oscar for Best Makeup.

In the film, Robin Williams' character transforms into a frumpy, older British nanny by using, in part, a fat suit.

And that fat suit is not hidden or secret or unmentioned.

It's part of the plot, right out in the open.

Before this, fat suits had been used for sketches and scenes, but Mrs.

Doubtfire ushered in an age when entire films were built around fat suits.

An era I can only describe as the fat suit boom.

This was when I was a teenager, and fat suits seemed to be everywhere.

And I mean

everywhere.

In addition to all the examples I've already mentioned, there was Martin Lawrence in Big Mama's House, another movie where a man dresses as a fat woman for laughs.

Oh, so Granny thinks she got gay.

Oh, yes, I got gay.

You're too fat to be bald.

Say what?

There was Martin Short's host persona, Jimity Glick.

Are you saying that you never had went through a period where you sweated too much or you were 300 pounds overweight?

And then there was Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow How, a fat girl convinced she'll never find love.

Can I get a double pizza burger, chili fries with cheese, and a large chocolate milkshake?

These fat suits and plenty more besides were made possible by advances in makeup.

But the real engine of this trend?

It's how we felt about fatness itself, which was, you know, complicated.

More on that when we come back.

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Starting in the mid-1990s and extending into the aughts, when the comedic fat suit seemed totally inescapable, Fatness was also all over the news.

As we go into the next millennium, undoubtedly obesity will become the number one major health problem.

In 1997, the World Health Organization introduced the term obesity epidemic.

Obesity is a health issue.

It's not a cosmetic issue.

It's clearly related to heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes.

So it's of course of great concern to public health officials.

The term epidemic has never made much sense to me here because you can't like catch fatness.

But fear of fatness swelled.

Much of the coverage tried to position itself as helpful, but in the way of, here's what you need to know to avoid this horrible, unhealthy fate.

I wasted way too much time being fat.

I would go up and down and up and down.

Look at me.

I lost over 50 pounds on this Look Fast plan.

It was a really fraught moment.

Hazel Sills is an editor for NPR who has written about fat suits for Jezebel.

Maybe fraught is too light of a word.

It was a really traumatizing time to be anyone growing up in that culture, but especially like a young woman who's like constantly fielding a singular idea of what it means to be a beautiful woman in America.

You only had to look around to see what the idea was.

If you turned on like One Tree Hill, if you turned on like the OC, if you opened up any tabloid magazine or like turned on MTV, you would see extremely skinny people.

Personally, I was fixated on Britney Spears' abs

Her rock solid, perfect abs.

Abs I didn't have.

I wrote over and over in my journal how I'd give anything to look as good as her in a crop top and low-rise jeans.

I asked Hazel if she shared my Britney Spears ab envy.

Wait, it's so funny that you say this because I had a Britney Spears doll, and if you pressed her belly button, she sang, which is messed up.

Culture was communicating its strong preference for thinness.

And if that meant paying more attention than ever to fat people, it was mostly to be totally freaked out about and disgusted by our existence.

And this kind of raging ambivalence, it's actually kind of good material.

Or at least Eddie Murphy thought so.

Going into it, I knew that the movie was going to be

a drag physically.

You know, I knew that I was going to be five hours in makeup every day, you know, and a really uncomfortable, you know, 40-pound, 50-pound fat suit, sweating all day.

This is Murphy talking about his 1996 film, The Nutty Professor.

Oh, Hercules, Hercules, Hercules!

This movie was a remake of the original Nutty Professor from 1963, which was written, directed by, and starred Jerry Lewis.

The brilliant thing that Jerry did with The Nutty Professor was to realize the comic possibilities and the whole Jekyll and Hyde thing.

And then said, now let's take those brilliant things that Lewis already did and put a contemporary spin on it.

In the original, Lewis plays a nerdy professor who creates a potion to transform himself into a suave charmer.

The remake, however, has one key difference.

Murphy plays a nerdy, fat professor who creates a potion to transform himself into a thin suave charmer.

That was the contemporary spin.

And in the 90s, people are obsessed with looking a certain way and, you know, and having a certain body.

And it's one out of every three people

is out of shape in this country and trying to get in shape.

Everybody wants to look like you know a model.

Murphy is connecting the dots.

He's saying anxiety about being fat was so culturally omnipresent that he could make it funny.

If you're going to eat nasty stuff like this, you realize that there's a gene in your DNA that routes routes this straight to your fat cells and it causes all sorts of unsightly conditions?

Case in point, this woman is suffering from what I like to call jello arms.

You notice the arm is taking on a gelatin sort of vibe and it's quite nasty.

We were anxious and freaked out and judgmental and sneering about fatness.

And what's one way to deal with what you're totally conflicted about?

Laugh at it.

Looking at it this way, the fat suit trend seems to have almost a simple explanation.

But I remember how I felt being in the room when people were laughing at fat suit movies like The Nutty Professor, and that wasn't simple.

I think I smiled at some of the jokes.

I didn't want to ruin the fun or call attention to myself.

It was also the closest I could get to observing what everyone really thought about fatness and figuring out how I felt.

There is a sort of a paradox at work here because the overweight characters were themselves the center of the narrative.

So they, you know, they were the protagonists.

Mia Mask is a professor of film at Vassar College.

But the films were really poking fun at the overweight characters.

And so the films were deeply contradictory in terms of the messages that they conveyed about what it means to be overweight, the social acceptance or lack thereof that overweight people experience.

And

these contradictory messages were emerging at a time when there were a lot of other contradictory themes sort of in the society at large.

I'm not saying that all this was flashing through my mind as a teenager, but an inarticulate version of it was.

On the one hand, these were stories about fat people as main characters that I could see.

And that was something.

But these movies, they weren't thoughtful about fat people or the experience of being fat.

And they didn't even star real fat people.

There were a few outliers, typically fat men, who were also usually in comedies.

I'm thinking of actors like Chris Farley, always on the edge of being out of control, making the joke and letting himself be the butt of the joke at the same time.

But Farley was an exception to the rule.

Most people letting themselves be the butt of the joke had no skin in the game.

They were in fat drag.

And as Mia Mask noted, there were often specifically black men in drag as fat black women.

This trend of Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, and Tyler Perry, to name a few, who had starring roles in fat suit comedies.

I mean, obviously the films are meant to be entertaining and enjoyable and funny.

But what we find funny, you know,

often also reveals a lot about the culture, a lot about our anxieties, our fears, tensions in the society and what we value, what we don't value, what we despise.

All these movies highlight that we have an issue with fatness, especially with fat women.

And that issue hasn't just been made clear to the people who watch movies, but to the people who make them.

Histories of Hollywood are full of stories of actresses forced by the studios to lose weight or lose their jobs.

This pressure was really brought home to me by an anecdote I heard from the Oscar winning makeup artist Matthew Mungle.

I look back on my career and I look at the dates here of the fat suits and all at once there's a trend for fat suits.

Matthew ended up making a ton of fat suits for TV shows like How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, and Desperate Housewives.

And he told me about an experience he had in the 90s working on a made-for-TV biopic about Elizabeth Taylor.

Early in her career, Taylor was considered the most beautiful woman in the world.

When she gained weight, she endured public ridicule.

So the actress playing Taylor had to wear a fat suit for part of the filming.

And Matthew remembers what happened after she put on her costume and makeup.

She was sitting in front of the mirror and she just started bawling.

She didn't want to see herself that way, fat.

So from then on, we couldn't have a mirror around.

She couldn't see herself.

She just had to rely on us

to make her look

good as a fat person.

And to an actress, especially who's always looking good,

that's a traumatic experience.

My first reaction to this story and others like it is that I really understand the pressure to be thin.

A pressure that in Hollywood is likely higher than just about anywhere else.

I can also think of plenty of times I've stood in front of the mirror and hated everything about myself.

But also,

give me a break.

Fat is not the worst thing a person can be.

And at the end of the day, these actors can just take the fat suit off.

Hazel Sills again.

I think the the thing that happens is when so much media attention and emphasis is put on the prosthetics and the fat suits that are being used in these roles, what it really does, it just like immensely highlights the fact that this person doesn't look like this in real life or that their body doesn't look like this in real life.

Our culture is obsessed with this idea that inside every fat person is a thin person trying to get out.

And the fat suit emphasizes this.

But just because that's how it is, doesn't mean that's how it has to stay.

When we come back, the idea of body positivity arrives and shifts the whole culture's attitudes towards fatness and changes the fat suit yet again.

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As the 2000s became the 2010s, the obsession with weight did not falter, but it did start to change.

And you could see that in commercials.

Retouching?

Never.

We're all perfectly imperfect.

Body positivity, always and forever.

Fat suddenly became a word that wasn't whispered behind my back or used to put me down.

It wasn't something to be ashamed of.

It was meant to be reclaimed, accepted, even celebrated.

To be honest, it all gave me whiplash.

I'd rarely seen a body like mine depicted in a positive light.

And now I was supposed to feel totally fine about myself.

And besides, the corporate version of body positivity didn't necessarily seem to be coming from some enlightened place.

Americans had gotten larger.

Now companies could turn a profit off the same people they'd excluded.

They were pandering.

We spend a lot of time as women analyzing and trying to fix the things that aren't quite great.

And we should spend more time appreciating the things that we do like.

On the upside though, now most stores had pants that fit me.

This new stance towards fatness inevitably had some bearing on the fat suit, according to the makeup artist Matthew Mungle.

If I had somebody say, you know, let's do a fat suit, I said, well,

let's think about this for a moment.

Why are you doing this, you know?

Online, a debate about the fat suit began to rage.

Some accuse fat suits of keeping people with different body sizes out of work.

Some people defend the fat suit as just a tool to allow actors to do their jobs.

Others argue that if actors want to play fat roles, they should just gain weight.

Amidst all these opinions, filmmakers have to be much more careful about using the fat suit now.

I think the producers and the studios have to analyze a project so much to say, how much backlash are we going to get with this project?

And this concern has had consequences.

Actors like Gwyneth Poucher have expressed regret for wearing a fat suit, while fat suit jokes that do still come out are often more self-aware, like when the character Michael Scott wore one in the office.

Now, I know a lot of you are probably asking yourself, why are you dressed in a plus size suit?

Because you're kind of doing Michael Klump.

How do you know Michael Klump?

Because it's your making fun of fat people character.

How dare you?

Michael Klump is a celebration of fat people.

I think of him as more like a monster.

But mostly what's happened is that fat suits have moved from comedies into dramas.

That means famous actors wearing prosthetics to look more like real people from history.

Think of Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, Viola Davis as Ma Rainey, or Tom Hanks as Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Without me, there would be no Elvis Presley.

But there's one recent example where the extra weight can't be excused by the need for so-called historical accuracy.

I'm talking about the whale, a movie about a 600-pound man played by Brendan Fraser.

If you don't graduate, then...

Are you actually trying to parent me right now?

No, I'm sorry.

I just thought that maybe we could spend some time with each other.

I'm not spending time with you.

You're disgusting.

You'd be disgusting even if you weren't this fat.

I remember first hearing about the whale.

I thought, finally, some art about the emotional complexity of binge eating, which I'd never really seen depicted.

But then I saw the whale, and I saw a costume packed with the same stereotypes and bias I always see attributed to fat people.

Pathetic and disgusting and depressed.

But Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for his performance.

I was baffled by all the accolades the whale got.

It seemed like fatness had become a way for serious actors to show off their chops, to take on a part heralded as brave.

Like it's so hard and miserable to be like me and millions of other people living full whole lives despite not being thin.

It seemed like fatness had moved from being something we should laugh at to a very special issue.

And somehow, famous actors taking on these roles were still understood as the real actors, while fat actors are seen as just, well,

fat actors.

We all recognize that it's problematic in some ways to have an Al Pacino playing a blind character or a Dustin Hoffman playing, you know, an autistic character.

Film professor Mia Mask.

So after we've given that person that award and said, wow, you did a great job playing somebody who was blind or autistic, right?

We recognize, well, why didn't we employ somebody who was actually blind or autistic to play those roles?

There are talented people who are fat who could play fat characters.

We are well aware of this with actors like Kathy Bates, John Goodman, Melissa McCarthy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Davine Joy Randolph.

But for all the lip service to body inclusivity, it's still incredibly rare to see fat people making it in Hollywood.

Like the issue is a really very simple but problematic issue of the lack of access to opportunity, right?

And as long as

that exists, you're going to need a fat suit.

People are going to think they need to brown up, yellow up, black up, fat up.

But if you create access to opportunity for folks, that will go away.

And if this were to ever happen, I think something else would change too.

The characters.

These fat suit parts are often so

shallow.

They imagine the only thing at the center of a fat person's life is their fatness, instead of that just being one facet.

And so if real fat people were given many of these fat suit rolls, they would alter them.

I think they would make them more than fat suit rolls.

Because how could they not?

Would a fat person want to be fat bastard?

Would they want to be fat Monica?

Would they want to be the guy in the whale?

If fat people were asked to play these roles, typically handed over to the fat suit, wouldn't they have to be different roles?

Change,

deepen, less the meaning?

Working on this episode, I found myself accepting that the fat suit will never be just what it is.

Mattress foam and makeup and nowadays CGI.

There may be nothing inherently horrible about the materials that go into the fat suit, but there is all the stuff we pile onto the fat suit, which is all the stuff we pile onto fat people.

All the ways we make them a prop, a punchline, a problem in their own lives.

It's all made me think a lot about my 15-year-old self.

Watching Courtney Cox and Gwyneth Palcho in a fat suit, suit, hearing about obesity every time I turned on the TV, longing for Britney Spears abs.

I doubt that the fat suit will go away anytime soon.

I just hope the next round of teenagers feel empowered to see it for what it is: a projection, and decide for themselves what fatness means to them.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Katie Shepard.

And I'm Willif Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written and produced by Katie Shepard.

It was edited by me.

We produced Decodering with Evan Chung and Max Friedman.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merit Jacob is senior technical director.

And we had mixing help from Kevin Bendis.

Special thank you to Mike Marino, Jackie Lucy, Gina Tonick, Kate Young, Barbara Miller, and the Museum of the Moving Image.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

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