Rebel Wilson on her weight loss and relationship with Ramona Agruma
With love in her life and a positive body image, Rebel Wilson is stretching her wings with new roles on both sides of the camera.
You can take the girl out of Australia, but you can’t take Australia out of the girl. So it is with Los Angeles-based Rebel Wilson. Unlike other actors who make it in Hollywood, she hasn’t ditched her Aussie accent in her movies but wears it as a badge of honour, happy to talk Strine on screen.
Wilson recently has nudged her career towards producing, and is planning to make her next film here. It will be her first movie on home soil since 2011’s A Few Best Men, with Olivia Newton-John.
And, in a wide-ranging interview, she’s prepared to discuss everything – from her dramatic weight loss to her recent “grubby” outing by a Sydney Morning Herald gossip columnist.
She’d been in a same-sex relationship with fashion and jewellery designer Ramona Agruma, and learned columnist Andrew Hornery was about to spill the beans on them. Wilson pre-empted the move with a photo of herself and Agruma on Instagram, saying, “I thought I was searching for a Disney Prince … but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess.”
“Obviously, my relationship with Ramona is something that I wasn’t hiding in any way – it wasn’t a secret,” she says.
“But coming out in a same-sex relationship, there are levels to telling people. You tell your close family and your friends and not everybody. Across our two families not everybody is as accepting as what you’d hoped for, and we were trying to be respectful to those people and tell them in our own way. Basically, with the situation where a journalist is threatening to out you, you’ve got to hurry and some people we didn’t get a chance to tell before it came out publicly. And that’s not ideal.
“It was just a hard few days, especially for my partner who’s not used to being in the public eye and not used to having to deal with stuff like that. It was probably more harmful for her in many respects. But to me, in 2022, love is love. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal and that we should kind of be forced to make an announcement about it. But that happened.”
Wilson, 42, who has law and arts degrees from the University of NSW, clearly has more substance to her than the rambunctious comic characters she’s played in films such as Bridesmaids, Pitch Perfect and Senior Year, currently on Netflix. Keen to extend her range, she’s taken on her first dramatic role in an independent British film, The Almond and the Seahorse, screening in the British Film Festival. After her adventurous role as Fraulein Rahm in Jojo Rabbit, she sees it as a stepping stone towards more versatility and “stretching different muscles”, although she has a few funny lines and is as lovable as ever.
Set in Liverpool, the story is about two women whose partners have traumatic brain injury. Wilson plays an archaeologist, Sarah, whose husband has sustained TBI as a result of a tumour being removed. She stars opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg as Toni, whose partner Gwen also has TBI from a car accident 15 years earlier.
In the film Sarah and Toni bond and have an emotional sexual relationship as they struggle to deal with their partners’ illnesses. It was Wilson’s first on-screen kiss with a woman.
“Oh, yeah, well, no pressure!” she says. “I was very nervous that day. Oh God, the first woman I’m going to kiss is the iconic Charlotte Gainsbourg. She’s obviously done much racier (roles), so I didn’t know how it was going to go …
“But Charlotte is so professional and great to work with and it was good. Obviously, it’s never very romantic kissing anybody on set, but it was definitely a cool experience. I kind of wish it went further in the film, but it’s more about their emotional connection, because those two characters are both going through similar things with their partners and needing an escape from that.”
The Almond and the Seahorse is based on a play by Kaite O’Reilly and directed by Celyn Jones, who also plays Wilson’s on-screen husband. The experience of seeing a loved one lose their independence through dementia, Alzheimer’s or a condition such as TBI is common to many people, and Wilson is no exception.
“My nana had dementia and it’s really sad to see somebody when their body is physically strong, but their brain is not there,” she says. “To watch her decline with that was really heartbreaking. So when I was a teenager – and she lived for the last 12 years of her life not really knowing much and not really being herself – that was really hard.”
Wilson also had first-hand experience of TBI with a man she dated. “It wasn’t as extreme as in the film, but you’re not quite sure why they’re acting in a certain way. There’s a mystery to it, and when they tell you that they’ve had a traumatic brain injury, all these things start to make sense. Traumatic brain injury is not something that’s talked about like Alzheimer’s and dementia. But there are so many stories of people who have had one themselves or who are caring for those people. You don’t know until you start talking about it how common it is.”
Wilson is refreshingly candid in this interview, and it’s a pleasant surprise. There are no publicists hovering, as is often the case. And on screen she looks amazing, having shed 35kg.
I’d read that when she was bigger she didn’t think she could have a permanent relationship because she felt bad about herself, so threw herself into her work.
“It’s a really complicated thing,” she explains. “It wasn’t that I felt bad because of my weight, it was that the weight was a symbol of me not processing things in my life and holding on to things. It was almost like I was using that as a barrier not to have deeper intimacy.
“I think beauty comes in any shape or size. So it wasn’t like, because I’m a bigger girl, I don’t think I’ll ever find love or anything. It was more psychologically, that I couldn’t truly let people in because I had things that I had to deal with emotionally. Losing weight in 2020 I kind of worked through that. And I’m certainly not perfect at it. But I addressed a lot of things and released a lot of things that I was holding on to and that turned out to be really, really positive for me.”
Her fans have followed her weight loss journey and have stuck with her as she continues the next phase of her career. She takes care of what she eats and makes time to exercise, trying to stick to her 10,000 steps a day.
She concedes her previous form made her distinctive: “There are still not that many bigger girls in Hollywood,” she says.
“Maybe I’ll stand out in different ways. Hopefully I can create amazing movies. It’s not just being distinctive because of my size but you never know what’ll happen in life. You know, I have such a sweet tooth. I still eat a bit of chocolate or a dessert every day, which I know is not amazing. So hopefully with my new lifestyle it doesn’t all creep back on again. But with my genetics I might just try to be a healthy version of myself, keep a check on emotional stuff and find healthier ways to process emotions rather than emotional eating or overeating, which is what I was doing before.”
Wilson’s success as an actor is something she still can’t quite believe. Her fame extends beyond Europe, the US and Australia. “You go to Dubai, and you see young girls in burqas looking at you with that look of recognition,” she says. “You know that they’ve seen my movies, so they can maybe go out there and be confident and do all sorts of things because a lot of my movies have girl power themes to them. It’s cool being quite recognisable around the world.”
This for a kid from western Sydney. Wilson says she’s still in touch with her inner bogan, grabbing at the free stuff at celebrity events.
“I definitely come from a pretty normal upbringing in Sydney, and I wasn’t a typical actress – I didn’t do it professionally as a child, I didn’t have stage parents,” she says of her mum and dad, who are dog handlers. “I was living a pretty normal life and I was going to be a lawyer. I studied hard at school and nobody would have picked me out of a group and said, ‘Oh, she’s an actress, send her to Hollywood!’. Even though I have some skills and abilities that are really abnormal. Hopefully I bring that relatability to some of my characters that people can love.”
The Aussie accent she sports in her movies, including The Almond and the Seahorse, makes her distinctive as well. When she first went to the US she was expecting to play American characters, such as in Bachelorette with Kirsten Dunst. In Pitch Perfect she was initially cast as an American and the director, Jason Moore, didn’t know she was Australian until he heard her natural speaking voice.
“I wanted Fat Amy to be American as (the part) was written, and he said, ‘No, no, no. It’d be much more distinctive if you’re Australian’.
“He was right and since the movie came out and was a smash hit, the movie studios literally sometimes say, ‘We will pay you more if you’re Australian’. With the big commercial films they like me being myself.”
In Senior Year, which Wilson also produced, she was able to bring Australian actor Angourie Rice to play her younger self. “It was great to give a younger Aussie actress an opportunity.”
Now, after also producing Isn’t It Romantic and The Hustle, she is producing the upcoming Rocking the Boat. “It’s a big one I’m doing with Leslie Mann and it’s very, very funny. It’s kind of like a Guilt Trip meets Bridesmaids movie.”
After appearing in the 2019 ABC series Les Norton, Wilson is looking forward to returning to Australia next year to produce an untitled film with an all-Australian cast.
“That’ll be exciting because I haven’t shot a film in Australia as a producer – hopefully it’s a 2023 version of Muriel’s Wedding type of thing,” she says. “It’s like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a comedy that’s got heart and will hopefully translate overseas. Even though it’s not a big money earner, the film is very important to me and I’m going to carve out the time to come back to Australia to do that.”
She is keen to make a difference in how her films get made.
“I’m now in my 40s and I’ve earned my way up in the industry as a kind of female leader, so I can make sure that sets are very inclusive and respectful, which wasn’t always the case when I was coming up. From a creative point of view, as a producer involved in all elements of production, I think my skill set comes from starting out as a playwright, so I’m very good at script development now.
“And, you know, the more you do, the better you get.”
The Almond and the Seahorse screens as part of the British Film Festival, in capital cities until November 16.