*Kim Coles is opening up about the behind-the-scenes pressure she faced while starring on “Living Single,” saying executives threatened to write fat jokes into scripts if she didn’t lose weight.
Coles revealed on the Aug. 6 episode of the ReLiving Single podcast that executives pressured her to lose weight during her time on the show. Coles and co-host Erika Alexander discussed the season two episode “Crappy Birthday,” where Khadijah (Queen Latifah), blindfolded and surrounded by luggage on a chaotic Atlantic City road trip, responds to a remark about the car’s weight with, “You better not be looking at me.”
“It is a fat joke,” Alexander noted. Coles replied, “We didn’t do a lot of that on this show, and I’m grateful that we didn’t… I gained weight every year. And we could have a whole conversation about [that]. I’m surprised we let that one go.”
Alexander recalled that early scripts contained similar jokes, but said Latifah “made it really clear, like, ‘We’re not going to be doing that,’ and then they disappeared.”
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Coles then shared that each season began with calls from executives to her manager, insisting she lose weight. “I would get a call… saying, ‘Kim Coles has to lose some weight. She has to lose some weight. She has to lose some weight.’”
According to Coles, one executive’s warning went further: “If you keep gaining weight, we’re going to have to start writing fat jokes.” She remembered telling Alexander at the time, and Alexander responding, “I won’t read those jokes.”
Coles said the threat came with the reasoning that “her friends wouldn’t say anything” if her weight changed. The pressure, she admitted, affected her deeply. “There is an expectation… of what they think sexy is. I had a really hard time as I was gaining weight and feeling as if everybody was staring.”
Alexander reaffirmed that no one in the cast would have gone along with those jokes. “You have to have willing collaborators,” she said, adding that the pressure still pushed Coles to “keep the image that they wanted.”
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