Gwyneth Paltrow's Shallow Hal body double was 'starving to death' after movie's backlash

Ivy Snitzer was a 20-year-old acting student when she landed the role of a lifetime alongside Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow in 2001 comedy Shallow Hal.

The premise of the Farrelly brothers' film saw Jack’s character, the titular Hal, hypnotized into seeing women’s inner beauty reflected on the outside with the primary gag being him falling in love with an overweight woman called Rosemary, who he believes looks like Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth. 

However, Ivy was the actual actress behind Rosemary’s ‘real’ body and while she felt it was progressive and an “exciting” and “fun” set, the reality of how her image was being portrayed only dawned on her after its release.

Speaking to Amelia Tait for The Guardian, Ivy revealed that during the movie’s promotional run, she happily appeared in interviews in magazines and on TV to promote better body image saying: “It is not the worst thing in the world to be fat.”

Ivy admitted that she had only ever seen the movie once, at the premiere where she had originally planned to sneak in but her costars encouraged her to take the red carpet route. 

She gushed: “I love that it’s a cool thing I did one time. It didn’t make me feel bad about myself. Until you know, other people started telling me I probably should have felt bad about myself.”

Shortly after the movie premiere, critics started claiming she was promoting obesity while others went as far as finding her address and sending her diet pills, both of which “scared” the young star enough to believe she was “done with the concept of fame”.

With acting dreams pushed to the side, Ivy left Hollywood for New York to focus more on comedy work and two years later she underwent gastric band surgery when a doctor warned her she may not see 40 without it. 

While Ivy couldn’t pinpoint whether the movie and the public’s reaction also had an impact on her decision to do the surgery she admitted: “I’m sure it was … I’m sure I wanted to be small and not seen but I don’t ever remember consciously thinking about it.”

Unfortunately, the band around her stomach slipped while she was in recovery and she “got a torsion” but without the funds to get it fixed, she had to wait three months until her work health insurance kicked in. 

During these three months, Ivy was left surviving on just sports drinks and watered-down nutritional shakes as nothing else would stay down and she was “technically starving to death”. 

She recalled: “I was so thin you could see my teeth through my face and my skin was all grey.”

By the time Ivy could afford to correct the band she was too malnourished and had to be hooked up to an IV fluid bag with liquid nutrition for four months before some other complications left doctors having to remove part of her stomach entirely.

To this day, the now-42-year-old still suffers from the effects of this life-threatening experience although she is now at an average, but she doesn’t regret the surgery as those three months helped her recover from the eating disorders she had developed. 

She candidly shared: “Because I couldn’t consume anything, my mindset became more about how much I could manage to consume, not how little.”

For help and support on eating disorders contact Beat Eating Disorders on 0808 801 0677.