Nobody in Hollywood knows Stephen King’s work like Mike Flanagan, and yet here we are again with another adaptation of King’s 1974 novel Carrie that doesn’t have the stones to cast a fat actress that resembles the character in the book.
The upcoming Prime Video miniseries Carrie sounds fantastic. Showrunner Mike Flanagan did a good job directing Doctor Sleep and an outstanding one with Gerald’s Game. The cast is packed with modern horror royalty like Matthew Lillard, Amber Midthunder, and Flanagan’s longtime collaborator, Samantha Sloyan. Summer H. Howell, who is playing Carrie, is no slouch either, with half a dozen horror films on her resume at only 22. There’s no reason to doubt her performance will be good.
But did we have to cast yet another skinny, conventionally attractive Carrie? This is Hollywood’s fourth direct adaptation and somehow the heaviest actress to ever play the role is Sissy Spacek. Angela Bettis, who was Carrie in the 2002 Bryan Fuller film is the definition of willowy, and Chloë Grace Moretz (2013) is a literal fashion model on top of her acting work. All of them did a fine job portraying a girl traumatized by bullying and domestic violence, but none of them were fat.
King is very clear that Carrie is thick in the book. She overeats out of stress and has no idea how to dress for her body type. The whole reason that the bullies dump pig blood on Carrie in the first place is that they think she’s fat. “Pig blood for a big” is used several times. Chunky, frumpy, overweight: these are the terms people think of Carrie in.
I think it matters. Fatphobic bullying is very common. In 2011, the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity reported that 41 percent of students reported weight as a factor in bullying, and 84 percent said they had witnessed weight-based bullying. Odds are, we’ve all seen a fat person getting harassed. Hell, the president does it.
There’s a more sinister factor, as well. Fatness has a long correlation with fascist sentiments. Sabrina Strings’s 2019 book Fearing the Black Body lays out a pretty convincing case about the origin of the connection between belief in inherent inferiority and hatred of large bodies. Combine that with the fact that fat people tend to come from poorer backgrounds and you end up with fatness being a handy visual indicator for someone safe to abuse, as Carrie is.
But that’s not the reason, I believe that, no filmmaker will cast a fat Carrie. It’s because Carrie is supposed to be likeable despite the fact that she murders a school full of children, the vast majority of whom did not actually do anything to her. Carrie is a tragic figure, warped by cruelty and twisted by ignorance. She is the hero as much as the monster of the story, and Hollywood rarely lets fat people be heroes.
I asked Houston comedian Susan Hinkie-Holt about this. She grew up and still is large, something she’s very comfortable with, but she’s not in the least surprised that another tiny person is playing Carrie.
“I don’t think they’re afraid to cast a ‘large’ actress (Hollywood plus size is what, an 8/10?) so much as they can’t fathom them as being anything other than a punchline, or worse,” she wrote to me on Facebook. ” I’m sure there’s a folder of market research somewhere that says a fat Carrie would cause a huge portion of the audience to, at best, not give a single shit about Carrie’s plight and at worst, actively be on [the bully’s] side, cheering her on for taking down a fat who dared to not be miserable for a hot minute. Or that that’s too many things. When your character is fat, that’s usually all they are allowed to be. What, we’re supposed to believe she’s fat and has a religious fanatic mom and supernatural powers? Absolutely not.”
A fat Carrie would make people uncomfortable, but for some weird reason Hollywood has decided that’s a bad thing in a horror movie. The industry’s cowardice about fat bodies robs Carrie’s story of so much potential. Imagine a full-figured Carrie sewing a perfect red prom dress that makes her skinny detractors look like immature children? Or her large body floating effortlessly through telekinesis while all the “fit” people scramble underneath her like rats fleeing a predator?
But no, Flanagan is just the latest director who didn’t even bother to try and return the character to her roots. She can’t be fat and be a complex, nuanced figure who straddles the line between hero and villain, and that bias is very, very frustrating.
Carrie debuts on Prime Video October 7.
