Debra Messing Was Told She Needed a Nose Job Before Kissing Keanu
We all know Hollywood has very specific standards for how a woman should look, but one person determined to smash through those cruel confines is Debra Messing.
"I'd never been on a film before," Messing told ELLE.com at the MAKERS conference in Paso Robles. "I was doing a love scene with Keanu Reeves. We started filming and the very famous director screamed 'Cut' and said, 'How quickly can we get a plastic surgeon in here? Her nose is ruining my movie.'"
The movie in question was 1995's A Walk in the Clouds; the director, Alfonso Arau.
"It was a shock," Messing said. "I was so confident coming out of graduate school with my Masters in acting. I'd studied in London and I was so well equipped with skill sets, and then to walk on set and have that happen-I was reduced to an un-Hollywood nose."
This criticism had a devastating effect on Messing at the time. "It's taken me years and years and years to finally own my differences and to love what's different about me, and to come face to face with a truth within my industry, within our culture. There is a very narrow definition of what a beautiful, vital, vibrant, interesting woman looks like, and that's the thing we're constantly fighting against. My entire career I've been swimming in that pond, where it's like, 'Oh no, you don't look right'."
"It's taken me years and years and years to finally own my differences and to love what's different about me"
As part of an after-dinner performance at the conference, which also featured Zosia Mamet and Rosie Perez, Messing read the full story in public for the first time. "This is a big deal for me," she said. "I feel proud that I have to come to where I am now and that I can share the difficulties that I had to grapple with. I'm still standing."
Messing described to the audience how Arau pushed her to do an unplanned nude scene, then lifted the sheet covering her to take a good look: "He dropped the sheet on top of me like a used Kleenex, then walked away without a word."
The nudity wasn't even used in the final cut. "It turns out," Messing said, "after all this trauma, the only part of my body that's seen naked in the film is my back." The young actress experienced all of this as "a power play" that would "demean me, strip me of my pride, my power."
Nine years after A Walk in the Clouds-after her success on the sitcom Will and Grace-Messing ran into Arau in the street. "He said, 'Bella! It's been so long, you were so funny in the movie, I'm so happy to see you again!' I said, 'Thank you,' and I turned around and never looked back."
"I have a strong nose, I have small breasts," Messing said in closing. "I'm a fucking original. My nose and I have come this far, and like Barbra Streisand I'm defiantly keeping it."
Messing has certainly had the last laugh–her dearly loved character, Grace Adler, will return to the screen in the forthcoming 2017–18 season after a ten-year break. According to Messing, fans won't be disappointed with the reboot: "It's going to be classic Will and Grace. We're going to talk about what's happening right here, right now, in politics, in the socioeconomic world, in pop culture, everything. We're going to do what made Will and Grace great."
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