Were she another kind of person, Jameela Jamil would have an easy life. Everything seemed to be going her way. First came the break that led to a job presenting Channel 4’s Saturday morning hangover slot, T4, which was followed by a job on Radio 1, before a swift, and unexpected, move to become an actor on the hit US sitcom The Good Place. Yet barely a month goes by without Jamil popping up to ignite some controversy or inflame the kind of commentator incensed by any hint of perceived “wokeness”.
February was a particularly difficult month. First, she came out as queer, which appeared to infuriate many people. Then she had to defend herself against accusations she had Munchausen’s syndrome – a psychiatric disorder in which people feign illness – an allegation started by a writer who didn’t believe her history of health problems. She ended the month embroiled in a Twitter row with Piers Morgan (public feuds being something of a natural stomping ground for both) after the death of TV presenter Caroline Flack.
Does Jamil ever feel like living a quieter life? “It’s not an easy path,” she says. “You get hurled up on to a pedestal and it always feels a bit like a trap – it’s very high, it’s easy to slip off and it’s a long way down. I’m just learning, I’m not the authority on anything.” She has not, she says, “handled myself perfectly at all times, but I am a human, prone to error”.
We talk on the phone, with Jamil calling from her home in Los Angeles, which she shares with her boyfriend, the musician James Blake and three friends. The lockdown has not been too difficult, she says. “I couldn’t feel more privileged right now. I’m safe, I have a house. I can afford to not work for a while and I have my health,” she says.
“On a more frivolous note, I’m really happy that handshaking is kind of cancelled for ever.” It has always appalled her, she says, and her explanation is something I have never considered before and will never be able to forget. “The fact you know that a hand has been on a dick at some point before touching your hand is deeply unsettling,” she says with a laugh, going on to describe it as “a sort of penile imprint upon your palm”. She has always succumbed to polite convention when someone puts their hand out. “Never again.”
She is excited, too, about the possible return of women’s body hair, saying that “we’re coming out of this furrier, chubbier, spottier and hopefully alive. And that’s great – we are the lucky ones.” Might it mark the end of the ridiculous grooming ideals (the lip fillers, the weirdly immaculate eyebrows)? “For women who have transitioned, I think not having access to aestheticians is really difficult. But I think some women are becoming used to seeing their faces without makeup, and realising that you don’t need all of the nonsense that we have flogged at us.”
Mostly she hopes that “our value systems are going to shift. Celebrities have been hero-worshipped, and now it has become very obvious who the true heroes are. And I think celebrities are consistently making arses of themselves.” I would be happy never to see a certain kind of influencer again, I say. “Who is going to have the money for cellulite cream, fillers or detox teas? No one’s going to want to see your $300 bikini any more. The way that we have looked up to money, fame and materialism …” She pauses. “I think that’s gone overnight because we don’t have the luxury any more. We’re talking about life or death. This is a depression. [Celebrities] need to shut up and open their purses.” (Jamil is donating to refugee and domestic violence charities.)
She has a new podcast, which started at the beginning of the month, and she will soon launch a YouTube show. (“Is there anything sadder than a 34-year-old trying to start a YouTube channel?” she laughs.) Both come under her I Weigh movement, a campaign that started on Instagram in 2018 to promote the idea that people, especially women, should be “weighed” by their achievements rather than the number on their bathroom scales – and to promote inclusivity, social justice and mental health.
The latest episode of the podcast features Reese Witherspoon talking about postnatal depression and her experience of sexism in the entertainment industry. Future interviews will be with the writer Roxane Gay, Gloria Steinem and the founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke. It is a sign of Jamil’s influence that she simply made a wishlist of people she wanted to interview, and they said yes. “I got creepy in the DMs [direct messages],” she says with a laugh. “I have absolutely no shame, and it’s great that the podcast is about ridding yourself of shame. This is also a podcast that is supposed to offer hope. We’re showing someone’s journey from the darkness towards the light.”
If her guests seem to open up, it is probably because Jamil herself is incredibly candid. In the episode with Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general of the US and author of Together, a book about loneliness, Jamil talks about trying to kill herself at 26. In other episodes, she talks about the eating disorder she had as a teenager. It is almost easy to see why the conspiracy theory that she has Munchausen’s syndrome took off; she has been through so much, almost too much for one person.
She attended an independent girls’ school in London (on a scholarship; she and her brother were mostly brought up by their mother, a school secretary) where she says she was the victim of racist bullying that was physical and violent. She was abused as a child, and was later the victim of several sexual assaults. She has said she is a multiple rape victim. At 17, she was hit by a car, severely damaging her spine, and spent more than a year recovering. Mental illness led to the attempt to kill herself in her mid-20s, at which point she sought therapy. She also went through several painful operations as a child to deal with hearing loss, and has coeliac disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissues.
In revealing so much about herself, she – unwittingly or not – places herself at the centre of many experiences. She may say, not unreasonably, that being so open reduces stigma, but it can also look like attention-seeking and self-promotion. This appeared to be what prompted the backlash when Jamil came out as queer. She had been criticised on social media for her appointment as a judge on Legendary, a TV competition inspired by black LGBT ballroom and vogueing culture. To all appearances, Jamil was a heterosexual cis woman who had been in a relationship with a man for five years. Jamil is not interested in justifying herself or how she identifies. (“Staying away from that question,” she says good-naturedly when I bring it up.) But was she surprised by the reaction? “No, I understood, because of the timing. I was never trying to divert from [the criticism]. I was just trying to add to the conversation; that I’m not saying this qualifies me as a part of ballroom [culture], but you don’t actually know my sexuality.”
She had not come out before “because I was worried that people would think I was jumping on a trendy bandwagon. And various other reasons. So I understand the pushback.” What she didn’t understand, she says, were the claims she was a liar. “What a weird lie,” she says with a laugh. “It doesn’t help to identify yourself in any way in an industry that still discriminates against people. But the rest of it, I understood. That’s why I didn’t come back complaining.”
The same criticisms around appropriation have surrounded Jamil’s campaigning on body image when she herself is slim and conventionally beautiful. She has been accused of shaming other women – most damagingly black women, such as the rapper CupcakKe (after the entertainer announced she had been on a 40-day “water fast”) without acknowledging that the policing of black women’s bodies comes with its own painful history. There have also been accusations she has adopted the words and ideas of others, such as the writer Stephanie Yeboah. Her brand of feminism has been described as “exclusionary … and toxic” by the writer Danielle Dash.
Jamil has always said she is constantly learning, and readily admits to her own mistakes and gaps in her knowledge. (In October, for instance, she explained she knew little about George W Bush’s presidency after being embroiled in another Twitter row.) Using her platform, particularly as one of the most high-profile women of south Asian heritage in the western media, puts her in a tricky position. Does she speak out about airbrushing and start feuds with the Kardashians over the diet products they promote – and risk making mistakes – or keep quiet? “I’ve asked repeatedly for magazines to put me on the cover with women of different body shapes, and with disabilities, and they say no. So either no one has the conversation or I do the photoshoot by myself because then at least the conversation gets had.” People have been impatient, she says; her YouTube show will provide a platform for other activists. “You have to take hold of the mic first before you can pass it,” she says.
Jamil is so divisive, seemingly equally championed by those who like her openness and sense of humour (she is not an earnest sort of activist), and vilified by those who think she is endlessly virtue-signalling for her own gain. Blake sometimes steps in. (After the Munchausen’s rumour went viral, he posted: “It’s pretty disgusting to watch the woman I love just be dog piled on every day.”) Would she rather he didn’t? She laughs. “I don’t want it to impair his career in any way just because I’m in a controversy. But it must be difficult to see people hurt someone you love. I’m very lucky to have someone this diehard in my corner.”
She says she is “absolutely fine” dealing with the fallout if she feels in the wrong. “It’s when it’s a lie, a smear campaign – that doesn’t sit well with me because that’s the technique of discredit. We make [women] sound crazy and unhinged, and we try to devalue their word and their work.” There must be days, I say, when it gets too much. “I’d say the Munchausen’s thing. The Caroline Flack thing really upset me because we were on good terms.”
They had not really spoken “just because of what had been going on”, says Jamil (in October, Jamil had criticised a cosmetic surgery show Flack would be presenting). “She reached out to me with a message of such love, and she passed away that week.” The next week, Piers Morgan posted text messages from Flack on Twitter, sent to him last year saying she was “struggling” with Jamil, “as if I was any contribution to her passing, when I’d never instigated any kind of argument with Caroline. I don’t criticise the host, I criticise the show.” She says she didn’t publish Flack’s last message to her “because I’m not a scumbag”.
Ultimately, she says, she will not shut up. Outspoken women, and especially outspoken women of colour, are disproportionately attacked online. “That isn’t just about the woman they are vilifying,” says Jamil. “It’s also a deliberate message they are sending out to all other women to not speak out, to not stand for something, to not break the rules. And that’s why I can’t back down now, because otherwise it would say that it wasn’t worth it and that I shouldn’t have stuck my neck out.”
The car accident partly explains her resilience. “Having a near-death experience gives you a strong perspective,” she says. “Being dragged on Twitter or being embarrassed on television – or rejection – nothing scares me any more. So I think it made me very bold.” She was also inspired by Yes Man, the memoir by Danny Wallace in which he spent a year saying “yes”. It partly explains her decision to move to the US and dare to audition for The Good Place, having never acted before. “I am definitely more surprised [at my career] than any of you could ever be.”
But it was her breakdown in her mid-20s that became the bigger pivotal moment. “After that, I realised it was very much do or die, and I had to investigate everything that had led me to such a low point,” she says. “One of those things was shame. You place the blame upon yourself, especially when you’re very young. But also just shame for being a woman. You’re too skinny, you’re too fat, you’re not smart enough or you’re too smart. I completely accept my own fuck-ups, but a lot of things that have caused a lot of trauma are not my fault.”
That’s why she does what she does, she says – the social-media posts that sometimes strike the wrong note, the fights, the campaigns. “Important conversations feel uncomfortable. And therefore we leave young people unarmed.” She would like to work on syllabuses for schools “so that we don’t learn more about igneous rock than we learn about consent, eating disorders and the lies of social media”.
What next for Jamil? She has built up a large social-media following and something of a power base. If it is to further her acting career, constantly criticising many aspects of the entertainment industry would be a funny way of going about it. So no nice, easy life for her. “I would do certain things differently,” she says. “I would rather start the fights that I start and sometimes get into the trouble that I get into than sit here silently and be complicit in an industry that pumps so much toxicity into the world.” She understands some people’s wariness of her, she says. “I look like the enemy. I’m a slim, privileged person who exists within this industry; I totally get the mistrust. I will just have to do the work to prove I wasn’t such a shitbag after all. I’m not doing this for popularity. I’m doing this so that I can undo the stuff that I saw when I was younger, that made me unwell, and try to change it.”
There is a smile in her voice as she says: “And sometimes you have to be annoying and attention-seeking in order to instigate that change.”
Jameela Jamil’s I Weigh podcast is hosted at www.earwolf.com
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
This article was amended on 23 April 2020 to clarify a personal detail.