If you were online in 2016, you might have seen the meme juxtaposing a picture of actor Chloë Grace Moretz carrying pizza boxes into a hotel with a character from the animated sitcom Family Guy. In the picture, it looks like Moretz, in high-waist shorts, has unusually long legs attached directly to her torso, perhaps a trick of the camera obscuring her hips. In fact, the picture is just edited (here’s what she actually looked like that day), but her body’s becoming a source of humor didn’t sit well with the actor. In fact, the Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising star said in a new interview that the meme’s virality on social media exacerbated the self-image issues she was already dealing with.
“For a long time I was able to be the Chloë that people see and the Chloë that I am in private. Then those two worlds collided and I felt really raw and vulnerable and open,” the actor told Hunger magazine of growing up in the spotlight. “And then came the onslaught of horrific memes that started getting sent to me about my body. I’ve actually never really talked about this, but there was one meme that really affected me, of me walking into a hotel with a pizza box in my hand. And this photo got manipulated into a character from Family Guy with the long legs and the short torso, and it was one of the most widespread memes at the time.”
Adding to the ordeal was the fact that she couldn’t get support. “Everyone was making fun of my body and I brought it up with someone and they were like, ‘Oh, shut the fuck up, it’s funny,’” Moretz recalled. “And 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. It was something so benign as walking into a hotel with leftovers. And to this day, when I see that meme, it’s something very hard for me to overcome.”
“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,” Moretz said. “And I think that body dysmorphia—which we all deal with in this world—is extrapolated by the issues of social media. It’s a headfuck.” Thankfully, therapy and the ubiquity of masks during the pandemic have helped Chloë Grace Moretz to heal somewhat. “To say that these past two years have been transformative is an understatement, to say the least,” she said. I’m a very different girl than I was. I feel like a woman now.”
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