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Fan Forum Legend
Joined: Aug 2011
Posts: 848,527
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Not yet. Catching up with Suits and have board stuff.
Quote:
“It had been living in my head for about eight years and had gone through so many different iterations,” Bellisario, 31, tells Variety of the writing process for “Feed” that began when she was 23 years old, roughly four years after her hospitalization for anorexia.
“I had enough distance to begin to write about this experience, and not write about it like a diary entry, but to create a world and characters that are different than my own experience, and speak about what I thought it was like to engage with this illness and try to get out from under it,” says Bellisario, explaining that “Feed,” is not biographical, but rather inspired by her own illness.
And so, working on “Feed” became a source of healing for Bellisario.
“There was one doctor who told me that when a lot of people go in for treatment, they won’t feel like they’ve come out from under their eating disorder until about 10 years of therapy. I didn’t understand that,” Bellisario admits. “I was so new to my therapist and everything that we were doing and I was like, ‘No, I should just be able to stop.’ I didn’t see that a lot of my thought patterns wouldn’t be normalized or made healthy again until after that 10 years, so what I thought I could do in that meantime was write about my experience and channel this story. And what if it can inspire other people to close the chapter in their life? I didn’t want to be struggling with this mental illness in my 30s. I didn’t want to be struggling with this mental illness in my 40s. I didn’t want to, god forbid, have a child and still be thinking in these patterns and talk to my daughter about it.”
She adds, “Over the eight years of slipping back into some unhealthy places and then getting back to it and speaking to therapists, it was amazing to have ‘Feed’ to go back to and think, ‘This is what it felt like when it was happening, but now I’m five years out, now I’m six years out, now I’m eight years out, and now, how do I feel about this, as an artist talking about this as a story — and not as my own story?’ I felt like I really needed that distance to be able to see it clearly.”
Bellisario admits that the process of creating the film was both “therapeutic,” but at the same time, also “inflammatory,” partly because she decided to star in the project. Those around her tried to convince her not to act in “Feed” because they feared it would be too traumatic.
“So many people in my life read the script and said, ‘Wow, I totally understand why you wrote this,’ but then when I said I am also going to act in it, so many people were like, ‘Why?’ because engaging in this disorder and engaging with this role and taking on this experience again would involve weight loss, it would involve some of the conversations that I had with a therapist and re-hashing those feelings. So everybody around me was like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?'”
To ensure that she remained healthy through the hands-on process, Bellisario says not only did she have a great support group around her, but she also stayed in close contact with her therapist, who treated her when she was battling anorexia.
“I wasn’t prepared for coming off of that set and going into her and how much of it was going to be aggravated. And it was amazing because she was right there to catch me,” Bellisario explains of working with her therapist. “It was incredibly challenging, but it was also wonderful because I was in a healthy enough mind space.”
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