Tara Reid is making her own comeback a reality
In a new interview with E! News, the 45-year-old actress talks about her career, becoming a target for the tabloids, and mounting her return after years away from Hollywood.
“I remember one day I was walking in New York City, I look over at one of the deli shops and they have all the magazines on the side and I remember I had, like, five covers on the wall all at the same time,” Reid says, recalling the time after appearing in “The Big Lebowski” and “American Pie” in the late ’90s. “I went, ‘Oh my gosh, this is happening.'”
“When we first started, we weren’t used to paparazzi. There was no such thing. There was no Instagram, there was no social media, but there were the tabloids,” she says of quickly becoming a tabloid star. “It was a different kind of bullying when it started coming up. To sell tabloids, what do you have to have? You have to pick a certain person that you’re going to pretty much destroy so they sell tabloids every day. They almost make a cartoon character out of you and they keep going with it.”
Reid adds, “It went from everyone loving you, being the ‘It’ girl, doing everything, and then the power of the media, even now, is very strong. It was tough because you went from, ‘OK, this is great, this is fun!’ to ‘Oh my gosh, what are they saying?!’ It started hurting my feelings.”
At the time, her treatment in the press was seen as normal, but in the wake of the #MeToo movement and documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears”, Reid sees that beginning to change.
“She definitely deserves her freedom back,” she said of her friend Spears. “I think she deserves control.”
In 2018, after starring in the sixth and final film in the “Sharknado” series, Reid took a break in order to heal from the damage Hollywood had inflicted.
“When I took a break, it was because I needed to for myself,” she explains. “I needed to get re-inspired in a certain way. I travelled a lot and worked on myself a lot, to get more confidence in myself where, sometimes, when you’ve been kind of bullied and put down, it’s like you get a bruise and you have to heal that bruise.”
Looking back on the tabloid attention paid to her undergoing plastic surgery in the ’00s, Reid says, “I’m very comfortable with my body now. When that was all happening, you do start listening and questioning yourself, going, ‘Oh, maybe this is wrong or that.’ But you have to look in the mirror and go, ‘I’m OK with myself. I don’t care. You want to body shame? Body shame me. I’m in the place in my life where I am happy in my own skin.'”
Now, though, Reid has a number of projects lined up, including the film Doggmen, featuring DMX’s final on-screen role, a rom-com with Rebel Wilson, and more.
“I’m not going to wait for roles just to come, let’s go on the other side and let’s create them instead of waiting because you could wait forever,” she says. “If you want something, you have to go out and get it yourself. That’s the only way because no one wants something more than you and no one can create something more than you and no one understands more than you.”
