Kristin Davis is looking back on her Melrose Place days.
In the latest PEOPLE cover story, the Sex and the City alum, 59, reflects on her storied career in television and gets candid about the entertainment industry’s unrealistic beauty standards when she was a young actress.
In 1995, Davis got her big break when she was cast as Brooke Armstrong in Melrose Place. At the time, the series was the hottest drama on television. Though she remembers her former costars like Heather Locklear with a sense of fondness, she admits that, “There was a general vibe on the set though, that was difficult, about the thinness situation.”
“Every single person was gorgeous and super skinny,” she says. “So I was like, ‘This is what I have to do.’”
Davis hired a running coach and would do back-to-back 90-minute spin classes. “I was frustrated. I was trying to do the thing,” she says. “Of course, I’m sure I wasn’t eating, I have no idea. I don’t remember the eating part.”
At one point, she says she felt light-headed and “fainted in a parking lot one time.”
“Sometimes I couldn’t remember my name. It was a lot,” she adds.
One day, the actress recalled getting approached by her costar Thomas Calabro in her makeup trailer and she discovered that the Melrose Place producers had a problem with her weight.
“He’s like, ‘Kristin, I’m so happy to see you here,'” she says of Calabro. “‘I just wanna tell you, you know, I think you look great,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you. What are you talking about? What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Oh, I know that the producers are really stressed, you know, but I just think it’s amazing that we have a woman who has curves.'”
When Davis expressed her confusion, Calabro reportedly said, “‘I just think they shouldn’t, you know, put too much pressure on you.’ And I’m like, ‘What?'”
She continues, “I go to the line producer and I’m like, ‘Thomas Calabro just told me that you guys are stressing about my weight. Did someone say something? Did Mr. [Aaron] Spelling say something?’ And he was like, ‘We think you look beautiful,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, and?’ He goes, ‘Just don’t gain any weight.'”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Davis acknowledges that this type of behavior on set was “just normal then.”
“It was normal for a long time. You could look at it either way,” she adds. “But I mean, there was a lot of stress. If you had hips, it was a situation.”
These days, Davis is opening up like never before with her new iHeartRadio podcast Are You a Charlotte?, where she revisits SATC episode by episode.
“It was scary,” she says of sharing a dating-nightmare story in one episode. “I’m usually very careful and do not talk about my private life, but here I am in this situation where I’ve started a podcast about the themes of our show.”
Read the full article here