6 minute read
Jameela Jamil
Meet British actor and activist Jameela Jamil – fierce advocate of body positivity, game-changing member of the sisterhood and AllBright’s inaugural cover star
Jameela Jamil isn’t messing about. On her To Do list, she has the patriarchy to destroy, a celebrity culture built on shaming women to defy and a global sisterhood to fight for.
Not forgetting her day job as an actor, presenter, writer and DJ who’s also keen to make some time to see her boyfriend, read her book and have a little fun.
If you’re British, you’ll remember Jameela as the first woman to host Radio 1’s chart show and one of the stars of Sunday morning hangover television, hosting pop culture show T4 from 2009 until 2012. Even back then, she was cultivating her particular brand of charm and sass with a sting in the tale, taking no prisoners with her wry, sardonic interviewing style.
For Jameela, being a South Asian woman and landing the T4 gig was a big deal. ‘Channel 4 was brilliant for casting me at that time because I was the only South Asian name, but no one ever talked about the fact that it was a first,’ she tells me over the phone from sunny LA. ‘My ethnicity was never spoken about. It was almost more palatable to see me as a white person. Owning my ethnicity has been a big part of the last three years. It’s cool to be allowed to celebrate that.’
Owning it has become a common theme for Jameela. Feeling jaded by London life and shaken by a breast cancer scare, she made the decision to move to LA. The plan was to get work as a screenwriter but her manager convinced her to audition for a role on Th e Good Place, the new show from Parks and Recreation creator Mike Schur. To her amazement, Jameela landed the part of namedropping socialite Tahani Al-Jamil alongside Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, a professional experience she describes as ‘heavenly’. As Th e Good Place – a funny, high concept meditation on the afterlife – became a Netflix-bingeworthy cult favorite, Jameela’s profile grew. And while keeping quiet had once been her default setting, the actor was finding her voice.
Jameela has spoken openly in interviews about grueling events in her early life that silenced and nearly broke her. She suffered sexual abuse, racial abuse, an eating disorder and was involved in a car accident at the age of 17 that damaged her spine, leaving her bed-bound for a year. ‘I suffered a lot of abuse as a child and a teenager. I stayed quiet about it my whole life and it made me rot from the inside out, holding it all in,’ she tells me with the steely control of someone who has had to reckon with a lot of pain. ‘That will either kill you or turn you into someone who can’t stop shouting. I’m very lucky that I’ve had therapy but speaking out is my way of taking ownership back of my own autonomy. I was coercively controlled by all of these different people to be quiet and I think that after getting into my twenties, I didn’t want to be quiet ever again. I’d been rallying for change when I was 19 years old. The first thing I said to my agent was that I wanted to have a big enough platform to make a difference.’
People are certainly listening now. In March 2018, an image on Jameela’s Instagram feed popped up and inadvertently set in motion an impassioned new social mission. The picture of the Kardashians with labels of their corresponding weights incensed her. In response, she posted what would become the first #iWeigh picture, a selfie listing her own weight but measured in all the things she believes women should value themselves by – relationships, financial independence, speaking out for women’s rights. The internet did its thing and iWeigh went viral, with women rushing to share their own metrics of self-worth. A year on and almost 400k followers and counting, it has become a fullblown movement which Jameela is about to turn into a company, to be mostly self-funded and run by her and a carefully selected sisterhood of women. ‘My plan is for it to become a big system for activism so that I won’t be on my own trolling toxic companies putting dangerous messages into the world. It’s going to be an activism platform that’s not about looking thinner and younger but about being smarter and happier.’
Practicing what she preaches, Jameela refuses to be airbrushed in pictures, referring to the practice as a ‘crime against women’.
She argues that as a society, we are becoming acclimatized to unrealistic standards of female beauty and has said previously that she believes it ‘has been weaponized, predominantly against women, and is responsible for so many more problems than we realize because we are blinded by the media, our culture and our society.’
Whether it's in her acting or activism, drive and dedication runs through every move Jameela makes, but she admits she has no strategy: ‘I love to take risks. I was so controlled by fear in my early years that, now I’ve broken out of that, it’s made me fearless. These days, the more afraid of something I am, the more likely I am to do it. I’m taking a huge risk with iWeigh but nothing like this really exists. We have this extraordinary community of impassioned people who are tired of being underestimated.’
The momentum behind iWeigh makes a lot of sense in a post-Weinstein world. A year or so on from #MeToo and Time’s Up, the appetite for meaningful change is palpable. ‘It’s been amazing watching the temperature change in every room’, Jameela says of Hollywood and the industry she’s now a part of. ‘We have all woken up and realized we were going through the same things. I’d heard of the sisterhood but I haven’t truly felt it until now. We’re all very angry – we realize we’ve been duped.’
Inevitably, changing the world can be an all-consuming job. Despite all the success she’s had since her move to LA, she admits that what is missing is contentment. ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made and I’m the most successful I’ve ever been, but it’s not success to me because I’ve lost my balance,’ she says. ‘I’m up to my eyeballs in stress and I’m not able to enjoy it because I’m in complete chaos. I’m currently working out a way to take a step back and share my work – predominantly with other women, hiring them to help me run different parts of my business. I’ve been sleeping three or four hours a night and I don’t want to run out of steam. On the outside it looks very successful but to me, it’s not success.
It’s important to share your load and share your glory with other women – there is great beauty in that.’
One particular wake-up call came from a screen-time tracking app that told Jameela she’d spent nine hours on her phone that day: ‘There’s no way that’s not hugely affecting my neuro-chemistry.’ So Project Balance begins, with an emphasis on the simpler things in life. ‘I’m big on physical affection. I got so busy and didn’t hold anyone’s hand for a long time but now I make time with my boyfriend for half an hour a day to have a cuddle and that slows my heart rate down. And I make sure I’m making time to read or listen to music.’ The boyfriend in question is musician and fellow Brit James Blake. The couple got together when they moved to LA at the same time three years ago. Last month, when he picked up a Grammy, she posted a picture of them on the red carpet proudly declaring that ‘he’s the best person. If I look like the cat that got the cream, it’s because I[…]am.’
It sounds like Jameela is a true LA convert. ‘The unashamed ownership of personal ambition, the utter enthusiasm and lack of doubt, the great food and amazing weather’ are obviously working for her (‘You can’t underestimate the effect the sunshine has on your mood’). She’s embracing the city’s healthy lifestyle too. The actress doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and she just gave up coffee, a decision which she says almost killed her: ‘It was like coming off heroin. I had a migraine, I was sweating, throwing up. If I can eliminate all of those things, it’s one less hurdle to climb...I’m a riot!’
In The Good Place, Jameela’s character Tahani looks back at her life from the afterlife, contemplating what she did right and wrong. In this real-life moment of reawakening and rejuvenation, it seems fitting that Jameela is driven by the bigger existential questions. What makes me happy? How can I make other people happy? ‘The meaning of life is to live it in a way that you will feel happy about when you look back on it from your deathbed,’ she says. ‘Taking risks, that’s been my ethos. To get there, you have to kill the bully in your head, the inner monologue that tells you no. And then you stop worrying about what other people think of you. I have a very busy year ahead and my biggest challenge is balance rather than Instagram followers.’
Jameela Jamil is the founder of @I_Weigh, her life-positive movement. She is currently starring in NBC’s The Good Place and soon to be seen hosting Misery Index for TNT.
