Christine Taylor has revealed she was asked to lose 10 pounds while starring as Marcia Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie.
The 55-year-old actress recalled the experience in the final episode of the series Office Ladies podcastto hosts Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey: “All I got was — and I wasn’t a super heavy person — but they asked me to lose 10 pounds.”
She said she agreed to lose weight, but added: “Of course I was embarrassed when that question came my way.”
The blonde star, who is married to Ben Stiller, called the request “so 90s” and said it would “never happen today.”
She teased that viewers who watch the film “very closely” will be able to see that she regained the weight after eating frozen yogurt when filming wrapped.
“I come into a scene looking a little rounder, and then I leave the scene looking a little thinner just because of the way they had to reshoot things,” Taylor explained.
Christine Taylor, 55, has revealed she was asked to lose 10 pounds while playing the role of Marcia Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie; in the photo in 2023
The actress recalled the experience on the latest episode of the Office Ladies podcast, saying: ‘All I was given – and I wasn’t a super heavy person – but they asked me to lose 10 pounds’; Seen in a still from the film
Taylor auditioned for the role after playing Marcia in a stage version of the 1970s series called The Real Live Brady Bunch.
Opening up about how she got the opportunity, she said series creator Sherwood Schwartz left a message on her answering machine “out of the blue” asking to meet her.
“I went to Sherwood Schwartz’s house and talked to him about The Brady Bunch,” she said. “It was a pinch-me moment…I can’t believe to this day that I didn’t keep my cassette tape from the answering machine.”
She felt confident about being offered the role after her first audition, saying she knew “no one could do it better.”
Earlier this year, Taylor opened up about her years-long divorce from Stiller, 60, and what prompted them to give their marriage another chance.
While on the McBride Rewind podcast, she described that time of her life as “challenging.”
“I don’t think we were on the same page on a lot of things at that point,” she presents to Josh McBride.
“I can talk about it now… but at the time, I mean, it was very difficult to come to that decision.”
Taylor pictured with husband Ben Stiller, 60, at the Met Gala in May
‘It wasn’t light. It was not without a heavy heart and a feeling of real dejection in that moment, of, this is not how I imagined it would be and we should have been able to work it out,” she recalled.
The couple married in 2000 and share daughter Ella, 24, and son Quinlin, 21. They announced their divorce in 2017.
‘Through all this we have always been in touch. We were co-parenting together. We spent time together as a family,” Taylor said.
The “silver lining” of the pandemic acted as a forced pause, allowing them to reevaluate their relationship.
“If there’s a silver lining for us during Covid, it was the little gift,” Taylor explained.
‘We have all bubbled up a bit together with our children. Our daughter was graduating high school at the time, and our son had graduated in eighth grade. We were all in the house together and just had time.”
“So Ben and I spent a lot of time working on us with a therapist and we logged onto Zoom and we did our therapy sessions and we really found our way back,” she said, adding, “I think it’s something that people don’t like to talk about because it feels like a failure.”
