Maxine Peake has revealed that she was fat-shamed and told she would "never play Juliet" unless she lost weight while training at drama school.
The Silk star attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) aged 21, with her attempts to secure a scholarship - which were eventually successful - documented for The South Bank Show.
Teacher's comment about chips
In a new interview, Peake, 52, spoke about the comments she received at the prestigious drama school. "I've been told at RADA by a teacher, if I didn't lay off the chips, I would never play Juliet. Those were her exact words," Peake told Anita Rani on the Sisters of Defiance podcast.
Peake said her response was: "I don't want to play Juliet. She kills herself at 16 because of a boy."
The Standard has contacted RADA for comment.
Other actors' experiences
Peake is not the only actor to have had a difficult time at the drama school in the 1990s or 2000s. This Country creator Daisy May Cooper reflected on her time there in a 2023 interview with The Standard, saying she had "not known bullying like what I experienced in that school, in any f***ing workplace".
Cooper said: "I don't think that I realised that it was real bullying until I started talking to other people from my year, or other people that went... That [kind of] bullying does not need to exist anywhere. It's not like, 'We're trying to shape you into the best people that you could be, so we've got to be mean.' That's not going to get the best out of people, that's going to leave [them] with scars that they can never fix."
Apologising at the time, a representative for RADA told The Standard: "We are very sorry to hear about Daisy May Cooper's experiences at Rada when she trained here, and would not tolerate the practices she describes in our present teaching environment. The wellbeing of our students is critical to us, and our wellbeing team works closely with students while they are exploring challenging material, and afterwards. We are also committed to a zero-tolerance policy on any discrimination, harassment or bullying."
