Playboy Interview: Jameela Jamil

Every once in a while, somewhere amid the shouting, social media can offer glimpses behind the Vaseline-smeared lenses of the entertainment industry. The stars and their feeds suggest a vast gulf between our regular lives and those whose accounts we follow, like and mimic. Actress, writer, DJ and activist Jameela Jamil is hyper aware of the dynamics at play and how they directly affect the lives of vulnerable people offline; indeed, she has taken it upon herself to protect those people. No one asked her to do this, and some don’t believe she should. Jamil considers it a duty nonetheless. She views acting and hosting as her work—and work she’s grateful for—but activism is her calling. She also thinks of it as just one of the many ways traumatized people try to tell the truth.

Jamil was born in London in 1986. Her parents were raised Muslim but didn’t run a religious household. They were conservative, however, and their insistence that Jamil play the role of helper in the family, coupled with a condition that rendered her mostly deaf from birth to the age of 12, left the young girl consumed by her own silence. In her 20s she worked in British radio and TV, developed an eating disorder, made a lot of money, spent a lot of money, gave away a lot of money, endured public abuse while coping with the private abuse she’d suffered as a child, had a nervous breakdown amid battles with depression, anxiety and PTSD, and discovered a lump in her breast. The lump, and the cancer kite floating above it, ready to crash-land into the human life below, changed everything. At 28 she booked a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

Soon Jamil learned the lump wasn’t cancer, but that didn’t mean she was going back to London. The move to Hollywood led to a meeting with agents, who sent her out to audition for a role in what was then referred to only as a new half-hour comedy from producer Michael Schur (The Office, Parks & Recreation). Despite having no acting experience to speak of, Jamil earned the part of Tahani Al-Jamil on what we now know as the NBC comedy series The Good Place, which signed off this year after four critically acclaimed seasons.

Over the series’ first three seasons, between talk-show appearances and panel discussions with the cast, Jamil quickly became a media darling. In interviews she was as funny as she was direct in her support of progressive politics and thought. On social media she called out influencers and other celebrities for posting personalized ads for weight-loss products, especially when those ads were highly visible to impressionable children; she even successfully pushed Instagram to block minors from seeing posts about dieting and cosmetic surgery. She responded to tabloid-journalism comments on celebrities’ weight with the hashtag #iweigh, encouraging herself and her followers to measure their worth in experiences, beliefs and identities instead of body mass or lack thereof. She has addressed the United Nations and spoken out about anti-abortion legislation. She supports numerous charities for at-risk young people and advocates for individuals with disabilities and those suffering from mental-health issues.

She has also annoyed a lot of people. By her own admission, those people haven’t always been wrong. For the past year or so there has been an interesting tension between those who believe Jameela Jamil is trying to help, those who believe Jameela Jamil is part of the problem and those who fall somewhere in between. Case in point: On February 4 (shortly before this issue went to press), HBO announced Jamil as one of the judges for its upcoming competitive voguing series, prompting Twitter backlash from members of the house-ball community who questioned whether the star deserves a spot on a show about an LGBTQ subculture. The following day Jamil defended her role on the show while at the same time coming out publicly as queer in a tweet, though she soon admitted it had been “the most inappropriate and unfortunate time” to come out. As of press time she was still committed to the show; Jamil is not one to let the naysayers tell her what to do.

Shortly before The Good Place aired its series finale, PLAYBOY sent writer Ashley C. Ford to Los Angeles to chat with Jamil, who was also stepping in as a guest editor of the magazine. Ford reports: “Jameela insisted we eat before we talked and suggested Erewhon Market near the Grove shopping mall. When I arrived at the upscale food store, I found she was wearing the same cactus-print pajamas I’d seen her wear in countless Instagram posts. She would later wear the ensemble to a party thrown by Beyoncé.

“On the drive to her home, tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, I wondered if Jamil was just another rich, beautiful woman one would expect to ‘get away’ with sporting sleepwear at the grocery store—and an A-list megastar’s party. As we discussed her work, her beliefs and her personae, it became clear that she is far too complicated to be defined by such a lazy assessment.

“Her voice, melodic and posh, serves the image of a popular TV actress. But she exhibits none of the obvious insecurities or over-compensations of Tahani. She’s graceful until she isn’t, and when she isn’t, it’s not a pratfall; it’s flat on her face. Whether she was or wasn’t what I expected didn’t matter to her at all. Despite being friendly with each other online for months, and being in conversation together at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, this was our first opportunity to sit and talk one-on-one. The day before the interview she found herself battling Twitter commenters after posting that she didn’t regret having an abortion. And of course, social-media standoffs are a natural place to start any conversation with Jamil.”

PLAYBOY: Talk to me about this abortion tweet.

JAMIL: My Twitter feed is a hot mess of people telling me they love my fetus. I’m like, No, you don’t. You don’t know me, you fucking creep. People can’t handle that I wasn’t in an emergency. I wasn’t a 12-year-old; I wasn’t a rape victim or an incest victim. I was just 26 and mentally unwell. Condom broke, morning-after pill didn’t work. Got failed twice in one day by contraception and then didn’t want to be pregnant because I was mentally unwell—I have a chronic illness. I wasn’t in the mood for 19 years of fear and responsibility—and 10 months of my body and my mind and my hormones changing, and all the pain and discomfort that comes with a pregnancy I wasn’t ready for. And I wasn’t in the right relationship. It was just all wrong, so I protected myself. And I’d do it again.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think that can be hard for people to hear?

JAMIL: Because they don’t respect women’s rights. Also, I think it has a lot to do with how you grew up. Mothers are seen predominantly in the role of nurturer, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s great. Being a housewife and a mother is an incredibly noble role in the world. But you then look at all women only as that. It’s like if you watch a lot of porn, after a while you start to look at all women as something that’s going to suck or fuck.

PLAYBOY: You’re guest editing this issue of PLAYBOY. Do you read it for the articles?

JAMIL: I always assumed it was a joke when people said PLAYBOY’S journalism was really amazing. It’s only now that I look back and realize how many incredible interviews have appeared in the magazine. There have also been some wonderful-looking women in PLAYBOY, and I really enjoy the female form. But once I grew up and started to understand patriarchy and objectification, and not wanting to contribute to that, I stopped involving myself with the publication. Then I went through a kind of heavy period of not wanting to see any kind of female sexuality or nudity. I turned fully the other way and started to become angry about female nudity, which I’m thankful I no longer stand by.

PLAYBOY: What made you angry about it?

JAMIL: I was abused when I was younger, but the thing that really impacted me around female sexuality was being raped when I was 22. That caused a sudden change in the way I felt around female sexuality and objectification, and I started to almost feel angry with the women who were empowering but objectifying themselves. I was mad at them because I felt they were contributing to the culture that made men look at me as nothing more than a sexual object. That was because I didn’t understand the concept of patriarchy. I didn’t understand the system, and I didn’t understand that it’s not our fault. There was some part of me that blamed myself, and I blamed women, and it just poured out of me, which was my response to trauma. I hadn’t had any therapy; I didn’t think I needed it. I felt mad at women, which is so ridiculous, because that’s not the right target. It’s a whole system of oppression.

PLAYBOY: Don’t you think a lot of women have had that response?

JAMIL: Yes, but I didn’t understand that until now. Having been someone who was quite slut-shamey when I was younger, a decade ago, I now understand that thought process. Some people come from a religious background. I grew up in quite a reserved family, with parents who had been raised Muslim, and even though they were no longer practicing, they still held a lot of the values. Sex was a taboo subject in my household. That contributes to our judgment around it, but there can also sometimes be a rage toward those we feel are complicit in the culture.

I do stand by one issue I have with the way women are objectified in our media, even when they objectify themselves. When Madonna did it, it felt like a fucking party, like everyone was fucking everyone. It didn’t feel as though one person was performing for another but that we were all in on the show. Now there’s more of a culture where the woman is in underwear and doing all the dancing, and the man is wearing outdoor winter layers and sitting on a chair. You can’t even gauge the temperature in the room—who has the thyroid problem? That annoys me, because why should we do all the work? And I genuinely think that attitude permeates our culture.

PLAYBOY: How do you stop doing all the work?

JAMIL: In bed, sexually? I just stopped. One day, in my 20s, I decided to stop. There was a specific moment when I was kissing a boyfriend, and I just stopped him and said, “I don’t like kissing like this. This isn’t how I like to be kissed.” I’d never said that before. In five years of kissing, I’d never told people—almost all of whom had kissed me badly—that I wasn’t interested in their style of kissing. Having the freedom to say, “I would prefer to be kissed like this,” felt like the beginning of my sexual autonomy.

PLAYBOY: How did the guy you were kissing react to your honesty?

JAMIL: Absolutely stunned. Aghast. But that was followed by the kiss I’d asked for. Then we had great kisses for another year.

PLAYBOY: You had your first kiss at the age of 21. Did you feel ready for it?

JAMIL: It was very weird for me to willfully engage in something I’d always felt was something that was done to me. That was really hard, even at 21, and it wasn’t the only reason I didn’t get kissed; I also had a tremendously unsexy personality, which has never gone away. I’ve got big boobies, so that makes up for it. But no, I don’t think I’ve ever been ready for it. The smartest thing I did was wait until it was someone I chose and trusted, and I knew he cared about me and already loved me before I kissed him. It was the most exceptional first kiss a human being could have. I swear to God, I fucking heard Nat King Cole play; fireworks went off—all the shit you see in the movies. I kissed a grown man who knew what he was doing, and he did everything at my pace. It was another six months before I lost my virginity. But I was with someone who was caring, who knew what happened to me when I was younger and just wanted to look after me.

PLAYBOY: Where did this reclamation of yours come from?

JAMIL: I had started to realize I was having sex like in the movies. I was having sex like porn. I was emulating. I wasn’t in touch with myself and therefore wasn’t really enjoying anything of a sexual nature. I was just acting like I was there to please the other person and make them feel good about what they were doing, which I think is a pretty common theme among women, especially since the takeoff of online porn. We think that as long as they’ve had a good time then we’ve had a good time. I’m not speaking for all women, but a lot of women I know go through that, especially when we’re young. We think the goal is to entertain and be reviewed highly among the guy’s friends.

After my nervous breakdown I felt I had the right to say anything because I’d gone through this sort of rebirth. For a lot of people, depression is just repressed rage and a repression of yourself. On the outside, it looked like I had a perfect life; I was this It girl and this party DJ, and everything was so charmed, but I was dying inside. I made a deal with myself that the only way I was willing to stay on this earth was if I told the complete truth. I’d been mentally ill and suicidal since I was a child. I tried twice in my life to kill myself: when I was younger, and again at 26. So I was like, This is the last thing you’re going to try—just tell the complete truth all the time.

PLAYBOY: What does it feel like to have a breakdown?

JAMIL: I’m English, so I’m not a highly emotional person externally. But my breakdown came in the form of inaction. I didn’t identify that I had depression, because I wasn’t crying all the time; I wasn’t lying down eating ice cream under a blanket. It was a complete lack of emotion. It was a complete lack of care about myself, about other people, about anything. Beyond ambivalence, it was just a numbness. I found everything overwhelming. Brushing my teeth at night was overwhelming—so many cavities. I found booking a flight to just be too much. Everything felt like I was being torn into pieces—not even in a painful way but in a way that just continued to make me feel more and more separated from the world. It’s like whatever George Clooney feels in the film Gravity when he lets go and just floats off. That’s what my breakdown felt like, that I wasn’t attached to anything or anyone.

That’s what makes suicide such an appealing option in that moment, so I desperately beg for people considering it to hang on. Often those most suicidal moments happen because of a particularly bad day, or sometimes it’s a particularly bad 10 minutes. I beg of you to stay and sleep on it and try to find help; try to do something you’ve never done before to see if you can reactivate yourself, and try telling the whole truth all the time. It explains why I’m now this maniac who has so much to lose but still risks it all. Because this is the deal I made with myself to put up with this shit, to stay on this earth. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to make it an adventure and figure out who the fuck I actually am.

It’s only now, in my 30s, that I’m starting to work that out, and I’m lucky I’m with a man who wants to know more and more about who I actually am. It’s the moments when I don’t know he’s looking at me that he finds most enjoyable, when he’s investigating who I am as a person. Even when we fight, he’s the first boyfriend I’ve ever had who encourages me to fight back. He never curtails my rage or my voice.

PLAYBOY: We’re talking of course about your longtime boyfriend, singer-songwriter James Blake. How did the two of you meet?

JAMIL: We met because we were both radio DJs at the BBC, and we became fast friends. I was moving to Los Angeles, and he told me he was also moving there. That was a fucking lie. He was like, “No way. Me too.” The lyrics of his song “I’ll Come Too” are explicitly about us getting to know each other, almost like a diary entry. Because for a minute I was like, “Oh, I might actually go to New York,” and he was like, “Oh yeah, I might also go to New York.” He’s just a hot, talented stalker.

PLAYBOY: How has James changed your perspective on sex?

JAMIL: I consider our sex life something sacred. What I will say is it’s fantastic, and he makes me feel safe in every single way as a person. My whole life, I was missing someone who would just make me feel safe. If you’re an abuse victim, the number one thing that can unlock your truest sexuality and humanity is just someone who makes you feel that way. That’s the time when you can most engage with who you really are and what you really want. That’s the thing he does every single day. I realize that whenever he’s not in the house, there’s a part of me that doesn’t even recognize that I don’t feel safe until he walks back in again, and it’s like a light switches back on.

Before him, I’d always felt that being needed was a burden. Now I’m okay with him needing me, and I’m okay with needing him. I was a very lonely child. I was deaf until I was 12. I lived in silence for a lot of my life. I didn’t have friends when I was younger, and I’m not super close with all of my family. I was very good at not needing anyone and being self-sufficient. I was almost smug about that—I thought I was Neo in The Matrix. I don’t know what the fuck I was doing, and it made me unhealthy and weird. I’d never felt family until him, so it’s nice to be accountable and responsible for someone else. I used to consider it a triggering burden, but with him I’m just all too happy to do it, and vice versa.

PLAYBOY: Why did it feel like a burden?

JAMIL: I lost myself in other people. I still have a tendency to do that, but I was conditioned very young to be of service to other people and was explicitly told it was the point of my existence, so it makes complete sense that I would end up being an activist. I’ve been an activist since I was 19. I come from a lineage of very mentally ill people, and I was the sole caretaker of all of them since I was 12. I’ve wanted to help people because I feel I don’t have a choice. It’s beyond a calling; it’s a duty.

PLAYBOY: Speaking of activism, you’re passionate about climate change. How do you feel about Trump trying to take on Greta Thunberg via Twitter?

JAMIL: I don’t understand his stance on climate change at all. We couldn’t have more evidence of how much humans are destroying the planet. All I know is that if he really didn’t think it was real, he wouldn’t be threatened by a child speaking out on it. His actions indicate fear; otherwise he would just ignore her. Greta is one of the most important people of our time, and we are so lucky that this unspeakably brave young person is dedicating her life to waking up the world. Greed is what is blinding these powerful politicians who value money over the well-being of our planet. Part of that comes from the fact that they’re all so old and they know they won’t be here by the time the worst of the damage is done.

PLAYBOY: How will you get involved with the upcoming U.S. election as a non-citizen?

JAMIL: I will just be encouraging people to vote. I will be encouraging people to educate themselves on policy. I believe marginalized people and young people are deliberately not encouraged to be politically engaged because they’re the ones with the power to turn things around in their best interests. That needs to change. They need to step into their power and fight together to create a safer world to grow up in.

PLAYBOY: Do you miss London?

JAMIL: I miss aspects of London, but London is in such a strange place right now politically. In Los Angeles you kind of exist in this weird little bubble, this super progressive area where there’s so much love and so many gay people and multiracial couples. It just feels safe here. Whereas in London, the discomfort is everywhere, like the fact that Muslim girls get acid thrown in their faces on the street there. I love my people, and I’m supporting them in the ways that I can, encouraging them to vote and take control of their lives.

But in my line of work, London is still behind in racial diversity. We’re still behind in giving women important jobs that lead to long-standing, dignified careers. The rest of us either get pushed out or get pushed into being nothing more than sex objects, whether we want that or not. Whereas I remember coming to America five years ago and seeing Robin Roberts hosting Good Morning America and knowing that Oprah is a really big deal here. Oprah would never have made it in the U.K. I couldn’t believe I was seeing women in their 50s and 60s of different races on the biggest shows on U.S. television. That was a big moment, realizing if I wanted to continue in this industry, I would have to come here, because otherwise I’d be sent to the glue factory.

PLAYBOY: How did you make the choice to move to L.A.?

JAMIL: I’d always loved Los Angeles because I grew up obsessed with films. I worked in a video store for four years. I’d always planned on coming here at some point, just to live even for a couple of months, but I never did because I fell into that trap of listening to the fearmongers when you’re a woman in this industry. You’re told someone else is going to take your spot and you can never be unavailable. I didn’t take a single holiday for six years, because I was scared. Especially when you’re brown in such a white male industry—which the television industry is in England—you feel lucky to be in any room.

When I was 28, I had a lump in my breast, and I had to wait a week for test results to find out if it was cancer or not. So I made a fuck-it list, and number one on that list was to move to California with no further plans. I found out it wasn’t cancerous, but I had to have an operation. You’re not allowed to fly until six weeks after the operation, so I booked my one-way ticket then: no plans, no visa, no money. I’d spent most of my money on charity and had also just generally mismanaged my finances because I was mentally ill and didn’t have a business manager. I was a fucking idiot when I was younger. Still a fucking idiot now sometimes.

PLAYBOY: What has it been like having your real life equated with that of your Good Place character, Tahani Al-Jamil?

JAMIL: So fucking annoying. It triggers me really badly and upsets me. Obviously there are similarities—we have the same hair and makeup style because I did my own makeup on the show; I’d rather sleep than sit in the makeup chair for an hour and 45 minutes. I’m also English and a person with privilege who is trying to work within philanthropy. And I’m attention-seeking because you have to be in order to bring attention to a big subject that needs to be addressed and has been willfully ignored. So I understand where some of the similarities come from, but people think The Good Place is a fucking documentary. I’m trapped by that. It’s the criticism most leveled at me, which I find very reductive and irritating. Say what you want about my ignorance, but don’t compare me to a fictitious character who couldn’t be further from who I am. She’s very driven by what other people think of her, whereas I couldn’t give a flying fuck.

PLAYBOY: How do you behave on set?

JAMIL: I’m chatty and inappropriate and I snack a lot because there’s a lot of waiting around. I had very bad gas during season one of The Good Place because American snacks are no joke. Why do you put corn syrup in everything? My director’s assistant didn’t know what had hit me. The fear of farting on Kristen Bell was worse than the fear of acting badly. She’s so small, she’s nearer my asshole than I am, so it’ll hit her first and worst. It weirdly got me through my fear of acting opposite her since I’d never acted professionally before The Good Place.

PLAYBOY: Do you have dream roles? Do you want to play a superhero?

JAMIL: I want to do the things I’ve never seen South Asians do. But I don’t want to be a superhero, because I hate running. I pulled out of a giant action movie last year because I didn’t want to run. I have no business being in an action role—I know my limits. There’s another Asian out there I’m making space for, and she can come in and do that. She can run. There was this scene in The Good Place of a big fight, and Janet kicks everyone’s ass. Everyone was featured in the fight sequence, but the producers decided that I would hide behind the pool table and watch everyone else fight. It took five days to shoot the fucking scene, and I pulled a muscle in my ass because I was sitting there for so long. I left being the only member of the cast who sustained an injury during the sequence, and I was the only one who didn’t fight. I was actually inactive for so long that I got injured.

PLAYBOY: You presented Taylor Swift with her Billboard Women in Music Award in December. How does it feel knowing she looks to you for inspiration?

JAMIL: I find it wild when anyone has heard my words. I met Taylor Swift 10 years ago when she was trying to break into England, and she’s been nothing but incredibly supportive. The worst thing Taylor Swift ever did was not fuck up, and people hate her for that. There’s something so unrelatable about a child star who doesn’t end up on heroin or piss into a mop bucket. It’s like, Who the fuck are you to come up with manners and grace? When I was standing there listening to her speak and watching the way she was to me and everyone else, I was perplexed by her reputation. I couldn’t marry it to the woman in front of me at all.

PLAYBOY: How does it feel after you decide to share on social media?

JAMIL: It’s a wonderful release. I’m so far away from humanity, but I feel I’m inching closer and closer every time I tell the truth. It started in micro truths, my version of microaggressions. Things like getting the wrong order at a coffee shop and saying, “I’m sorry, this is actually the wrong order. May I please have the thing I wanted?” It started in restaurants and coffee shops, where I advise all people to start. Then I would slowly gear up the courage to tell more and more different kinds of people they were doing something that did not fit with what I wanted. But it started with coffee orders.

I haven’t really had a bad reaction to telling people I want more. If anything, I’ve had a great reaction, to the point where I’ve realized why women have been told not to ask: Because when you ask, sometimes you actually get what you’ve asked for, and they didn’t want us to know that. They told us never to ask, because you’re likely to fucking get it. For the past two years James has been amazing at pushing me to ask for more money. I walked away from a big show I really wanted. Three times I said no to the offers, even though I was scared they were going to tell me, “Fine, we’ll go find someone else.” But I did it. I stuck to my guns, and then I got the money I wanted and got equal pay with all the men I would be working with.

PLAYBOY: Has this ever cost you professionally?

JAMIL: Yes. I’ve spoken out against toxic people at the top and gone to HR and then shortly after lost a job I was up for within the same company. I’ve cost myself millions of dollars. I’m doing okay financially right now, but I would be so rich if I had put my principles aside and worked with the beauty and weight-loss-product companies that have wanted me to endorse them for a decade. I would own six houses. I own zero houses because of my stupid fucking principles.

I don’t want to be part of the poison that poisoned me when I was younger and made me crazy. So I’ve very much bitten the hand that feeds me. I’ve made enemies everywhere because I tell the truth. I’m a whistle-blower, which is just a fancy term for tattletale. I think it’s genuinely why I’ve never been sexually harassed in this business. I’ve been sexually harassed outside it, but in this business it’s been very clear from the outset that I don’t have a filter.

PLAYBOY: Many of your tweets create polarizing reactions, and sometimes you’ll admit that you shouldn’t have weighed in on a topic. How do you come to that conclusion?

JAMIL: I don’t nail it all the time. I’ve taken and eaten a lot of Ls—so many embarrassing mistakes. I’ve fucked up, but I promise to be better and more aware. In November there was a controversy between me and the rapper CupcakKe when she said she’d been on a month-long water fast and showed gorgeous photographs of herself after this fast. I didn’t research her. What asshole in my position doesn’t research who I’m talking about, especially when that woman is marginalized? A stressed-out chaotic moron, that’s who. I was mortified that I didn’t know this was someone who was suicidal, mentally ill. I thought I was saying it with love, but I didn’t know who I was talking to. And that happens all the time. I’m changing strategy for this next decade to be more careful, more of a grown-up, to accept that there’s a lot to catch up with. And now it’s so on me.

PLAYBOY: A lot of people online, especially influencers, do share those weight-loss products with their audiences. I’m talking about Kim Kardashian.

JAMIL: Never heard of her.

PLAYBOY: Or Kylie Jenner.

JAMIL: Never heard of her.

PLAYBOY: Seriously, I’m wondering how you feel about being in an industry with people who do things you find not just wrong but personally offensive.

JAMIL: Heinous. I feel sullied by it, and that’s why I rage so hard against it as my emotional version of a carbon footprint. I’m trying to level out the fact that I am participating in this. I’ve been an activist for 14 years, and I was never able to change laws and policies until I was in this industry—until I was in the belly of the beast. Even when people don’t like the things I talk about, they’re fucking talking about them. I start big global conversations. I rage hard against it to try to undo all the toxicity. This industry was responsible for so much of my self-hatred when I was younger. I know the exact impact of the behavior of everyone in this industry, behavior they engage in because they’re driven by corporate greed.

I can’t believe the things I didn’t know. When I was 26 and a radio DJ, I got super fat-shamed for months on magazine covers—pictures of my thighs, ass, bare buttocks. They’d get a photograph of me picking up my house keys outside my front door at seven A.M., and that photo has lived on and on and on. Paparazzi would stalk me outside my house and call me a fat cunt, trying to provoke a reaction from me. People would roll down their car window and scream at me that they hate me now that I’m fat. It was insane, and my Twitter was a mess.

But that’s when I realized how we treat fat women. At that point, I hadn’t been fat in years, and I’d never been fat and famous. I’ve been skinny and famous because I had a serious eating disorder. To see how disgustingly we dehumanize and berate and abuse fat women, even when you’re on the radio—that made me realize I had to kick up the fight against fat phobia. That’s when my activism became stronger, and I started speaking in Parliament and doing all these things. There are speeches on the internet that I made eight years ago.

PLAYBOY: I’ve watched some of those.

JAMIL: It’s so frustrating when people think I took this up after The Good Place. There are receipts all over the fucking internet that I’ve been saying this for years. I’ve been a fucking broken record for 10 years. After I gained all the weight, I was flooded with endorsement offers from weight-loss programs, saying, “We want to take you out on the beach and get humiliating photographs of you with your stomach out, eating a burger, running. We want you as unflattering as possible. Then we’re going to chart your weight-loss success and sell a DVD and a diet off the back of it.” When we see those pictures of celebrities at the beach followed by three months of speedy progress, they’re being paid to do that, and they’re being paid for the humiliating photographs we see in the National Enquirer and Daily Mail. It’s a marketing tactic.

PLAYBOY: You’ve said you don’t want to talk about body positivity anymore. Why is that?

JAMIL: First of all, body positivity is a sociopolitical movement that’s not for me, right? I’m a straight-size woman, and that movement was created out of pure vital necessity, because women have to love something that society hates so much and for which they’re medically discriminated against. My polycystic ovary syndrome was missed because I was chubby, and my friends have had endometriosis misdiagnosed because they were chubby. We get fat-shamed by our own doctors. You don’t get jobs; you don’t get to date as much. You don’t get treated with basic human fucking dignity and respect out in the streets. Body positivity is a response to extreme measures of hatred and discrimination. A straight-size person taking space in that movement is hugely unethical. And as someone who was obsessed with my figure for decades, body positivity is still me thinking about my body. I’m still locked in the cage. Whether I love it or hate it, I don’t want to think about it. My boyfriend isn’t thinking about his body; he’s getting shit done.

But because my body’s been such a priority, I can’t love and love and love something, especially not something society has programmed me to hate, which is reinforced every time I open my phone. There is either subliminal or very aggressive messaging built to tell me that there’s something wrong with me, that I’m old and fat and wrong and ugly, so I can’t love this. Body positivity for me is too fucking hard, and a lot of people feel that way regardless of their size. I fucking love the idea that we ought to stand in front of a mirror and love ourselves. I hope I get there, but I’m nowhere near that yet. I still have severe body dysmorphia, so I’d rather not engage. I’m into body neutrality: This is just my car that I get in to go around.

So I’ve made more money, I’ve gotten more things done, I’ve become a better friend, I’ve become a better lover. I am a better person for disengaging from my obsession. For too many women, it is an obsession. So if it’s your obsession, I suggest, at least as a first step before body positivity, don’t try to get all the way to love. Just get to acceptance and then love. There’s pressure to love ourselves no matter what, in spite of all this hatred, and I get it, but it’s fucking hard for some of us.

PLAYBOY: How do you respond to people who think I Weigh is a body-positivity movement?

JAMIL: People think it’s a body-positive movement because the press keeps willfully describing it as that, no matter how many times I’ve said it’s not. I actually request beforehand in all interviews, “Please don’t announce me as this. Please don’t talk about it as this. It’s a mental-health movement; it’s not a body-positive movement.” But they place me in it because we have a habit of placing thin women in the body-positive movement. We want to have the conversation, but we don’t want to show a picture of a fat woman on a magazine cover. I’ve tried to get fat women on covers with me, and men told me, “Then you can’t have the cover.” So my principle says, “Okay, then fuck you.” But if I don’t do it, no one has that conversation, because the next actress on that cover sure as shit isn’t going to talk about it. They’re going to stay in their fucking lane.

So then I end up taking space. If not me, then who? It’s this frustrating situation we see a lot with poverty, where someone with privilege talks about the injustice, and we tell them to shut the fuck up. If we don’t listen to the poor, and we also won’t listen to the privileged, then who gets to speak?

PLAYBOY: As the message spreads and grows, how will you convey that it belongs not just to this one representative but to myriad people?

JAMIL: Not everyone’s going to get this immediately. I look like the fucking enemy. I’m slim. All of a sudden I’m conventionally attractive, even though until now South Asians were a big no-no. But brown is suddenly in. I’ve suddenly entered into privilege in that area—the “pretty privilege” or whatever the fuck they call it—after years of being called a monkey and a curry-smelling Paki on Twitter when I was on television. But I know my end goal and my intentions. I have to just let them distrust me and dislike me and keep going, because we all have the same end goal. We can’t fucking nitpick each other over it all the time.

What I’m now building, what I’ve spent all my money on in the past year, is hiring women to help me tell the stories of other people so they can tell their own stories in their own dignified ways. We’re launching a platform of storytelling, be it via video or written word or podcasts. I needed to get loud and take up space to get this much power and privilege so that I now have the power to create space for other people. But you have to let someone get up there first so they can open the fucking door.

PLAYBOY: What else is on the horizon?

JAMIL: I’m launching my own company, which is terrifying. I’ve never been a CEO before, but with I Weigh I’m having to learn business, learn the ins and outs of the incredibly litigious American system, learn about changing laws and bills and policies. I just want to know how badly I can fuck this up. Like when I speak openly about abortion, I want to know what’s going to happen if I just tell the whole truth. My dad always used to say, “Look, they’re not going to take you out in the street and shoot you.” So I’ve always had that as an absurd limit: “Well, as long as I’m not going to be literally shot.…” I’m just a very curious cat—except that I’ve never tried booze, coke or bum sex. For those, I’m okay never finding out.