Jenna Ortega Has Reopened an Important Question Too

Images from Jenna Ortega's recent interview reignited the debate over the extreme thinness spreading once again through Hollywood, and, in turn, over how fair it really is to talk about someone's body.

August 12, 2026 · 10 min

On August 11, Jenna Ortega opened up in a lengthy Esquire interview about her career: her early days as a child prodigy, working with Tim Burton, the sudden explosion of Wednesday. The day before, the UK's medicines regulator had approved Foundayo, the first GLP-1 pill designed for weight management, a different active ingredient from Ozempic but with the same mechanism of action. The two stories had nothing in common beyond the coincidence of timing. Yet as soon as the interview photos went up, someone connected them anyway: online, Ortega's body became the main topic, far more than the career she'd actually been talking about.

Among the many anecdotes she shared with Esquire, one in particular was read out of context. Ortega recalls that as a child, on her earliest sets, she could go a whole day without eating or drinking, not because she was on some kind of diet, but because she didn't want to bother anyone. "I wasn't asking for a sip of water. I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody," she said. Looking back, she added that this, perhaps, was her only real mistake: not taking care of herself. It's a memory that speaks to gratitude pushed to an extreme, to the need to seem easy to manage when you're young and afraid of losing an opportunity. As she tells it herself, it isn't about weight or appearance at all.

Online, though, the line was reread as an indirect confirmation of something else, and the comments zeroed in on her current appearance, with recurring comparisons to Ariana Grande, another actress and singer whose thinness was the subject of public debate just weeks earlier. Ortega has never said she has an eating disorder, nor that she has used GLP-1 medications. Neither of these two things, the childhood memory and today's appearance, proves the other. They remain two separate facts, held together only by the way they're being told.

It's worth pausing on this before going further. Judging someone's body, measuring it, using it as proof of something that person never said, is an exercise that almost always causes more harm than clarity. Ortega never asked to be looked at this way, and neither has anyone else who ends up at the center of this kind of attention.

What does deserve attention is the context her interview landed in: an industry where, increasingly, a small body is read as a sign of success, and where the tools to get there quickly are, today, more accessible than ever. Ariana Grande explained this better than anyone, a couple of years ago, when she pointed out that the curvier body many fans nostalgically compare her to actually belonged to a period of her life she herself has called unhealthy. Grande's point was simple: no body, on its own, tells the story of the person living in it.

Why the method matters more than the result

A recently published study helps explain why we look at famous people's bodies with so much judgment. Researchers asked more than a thousand people to evaluate a fictional character who lost weight in three different ways: through diet and exercise, through Ozempic, or through both. The result was clear. Weight loss achieved through diet and exercise alone was seen as the most praiseworthy. Weight loss achieved with the drug, even when paired with a healthy lifestyle, was perceived as less effortful and less praiseworthy. Someone who lost weight using the drug alone was seen as a person who hadn't truly changed, neither in appearance nor in values.

It's a finding that says a lot about the morality we attach to bodies, more than about the bodies themselves. Social research has shown for decades that we tend to treat being overweight as a personal failing, tied to laziness or a lack of willpower. The same mechanism kicks in when someone loses weight in a way that looks too easy: bariatric surgery, for instance, produces reactions similar to the ones Ozempic gets today. Someone who loses weight that way, according to common prejudice, hasn't really paid the price.

The paradox is that this judgment is being applied to a drug that, it's worth remembering, was developed to treat type 2 diabetes. Ozempic, and its higher-dose version designed for weight control, Wegovy, share the active ingredient semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist that mimics a natural hormone in the body, increases the feeling of fullness, and slows down stomach emptying. It wasn't created as an aesthetic shortcut.

A pendulum that has swung before

Anyone who lived through the nineties recognizes this pattern. It was called heroin chic, and it described an aesthetic ideal built on extreme thinness, pale skin, sunken eyes, features that echoed heroin use. Kate Moss was its most cited icon: 5'6" and 88 pounds, a body that broke with the supermodels who came before her, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, thin but full-figured, curvy, fleshed out.

One detail makes this cycle even more visible today. Cindy Crawford's daughter, Kaia Gerber, works in the same world as her mother, with an almost identical face, but a completely different body. Where Cindy showed off curves, Kaia shows off collarbones and shoulder blades. She has never spoken about it openly. In this case, the photographs say more than any interview could.

The point isn't to establish whether today's thinness is identical to that of thirty years ago. It's to notice that the fashion and entertainment industry tends to circle back, fairly regularly, to the same ideal, regardless of how much cultural work has been done in the meantime to broaden it.

The drug that changed the rules of the game

That cultural work, over the past decade, had a precise name: body positivity. Curvy bodies shown off with pride, more inclusive ad campaigns, plus sizes on the runway. Then something started shifting again, and GLP-1 drugs are among the most cited drivers of that shift.

Between 2020 and the end of 2022, prescriptions for Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar drugs rose 300 percent in the United States, with more than nine million prescriptions written in the last quarter of 2022 alone. Alongside Ozempic, Mounjaro has also taken hold, active ingredient tirzepatide, which acts on two receptors instead of one, GIP and GLP-1, with a similar effect on appetite and blood sugar control.

Some celebrities have talked about it openly. Singer Meghan Trainor wrote on social media that she'd followed a medication-based path after her second pregnancy, naming Mounjaro without hesitation. Actress Amy Schumer has linked her weight loss to Cushing's syndrome and perimenopause, conditions that can cause weight gain, and has said she used the same drug. In these cases there's no ambiguity: the people involved are telling their own stories.

Many other names, though, remain in the realm of speculation. Demi Moore's, Nicole Kidman's, Ariana Grande's, Kelly Osbourne's, and Bella Hadid's bodies have repeatedly been linked to semaglutide use by experts interviewed by the press, particularly outlets like the Daily Mail, which have pointed to recognizable signs like gaunt arms or loose skin following rapid weight loss. None of these women has confirmed using Ozempic for cosmetic reasons. Some have offered different explanations: Kelly Osbourne cited grief over her father's death, while acknowledging her weight loss had begun before that. Bella Hadid has linked her physique to Lyme disease, which she has lived with since 2012, while also having spoken in the past about eating disorders tied to the pressures of the fashion industry. Victoria Beckham has always had a slight build, which she attributes to years of extreme dieting, not necessarily a drug.

The gap between what's actually said and what's merely observed, and then commented on, is probably the most delicate part of this story. What a person chooses to share about their own body is one thing. What outside observers read into it, often with no concrete evidence at all, just a photo comparison between one red carpet and the one from the year before, is another.

A side effect with a name of its own

There's also a medical side to this, less discussed than the aesthetic one. Rapid weight loss has visible consequences on skin and tissue, and it has become a subject of study for dermatologists. The phenomenon already has a name, Ozempic Face: volume loss in the midface, skin laxity, an appearance that looks aged compared to before the weight loss. Research analyzing Google search trends found that interest in the term "Ozempic Face" grew faster than interest in other well-known side effects of the drug, like nausea or gastrointestinal issues, a sign that concern over appearance worries patients as much as, if not more than, the actual medical risks.

A qualitative analysis of TikTok posts under the hashtag Ozempic Face found the same pattern repeating itself: people describing volume loss in the face, then seeking solutions, fillers, skin-tightening treatments, surgery. The drug that promises a slimmer body often ends up requiring a second cosmetic procedure to fix the effects of the first.

What you can see in stores

The shift isn't limited to the bodies of famous people. It shows up in clothing production too. Until recently, brands distributed sizes according to a fairly stable formula: one small, two mediums, two larges, one extra-large. Several industry sources now point to a reversal, toward a model with more small and medium sizes and fewer larges. The consequences aren't just symbolic: garments made in plus sizes go unsold, generating real losses for companies, while demand grows for fitted silhouettes, cutouts, clothes that flatter a thin body. Athleisure is on the rise too, sportswear designed to be worn all day, which in its own way speaks to a broader obsession with performance and body control.

A dissenting voice

Not everyone working in this world watches the phenomenon with resignation. Ashley Graham, among the models who did the most to bring curvy bodies onto the runway, called the drug-driven return of thinness "a slap in the face" to body positivity, in an interview with Marie Claire.

"There was a moment when the pendulum swung toward body acceptance, positivity, everyone's right to be who they want to be. Now it's swinging in the exact opposite direction, and that feels like a real step backward to me."

Graham doesn't sound defeated, though. She maintains that the work done in recent years, alongside other models and content creators of different sizes, doesn't disappear just because fashion is looking elsewhere again. Her position is useful because it shifts the conversation from judging individual bodies to a question about the system that puts them on display, and decides, case by case, which body is worth showing.

The question that remains

Coming back to where this started, which is also what pushed Ariana Grande to step back from the spotlight for a while: the online reaction to bodies like Ortega's or Grande's reveals an absence more than a certainty. We still don't have a shared way to talk about a body that's suffering in public, if it really is suffering. Those who worry and those who attack often end up feeding the same mechanism, the one that turns a body into a place where culture argues with itself, instead of a person with a life beyond the screen. Staying at a distance, behind a comment or an assumption, is easier than admitting we don't have a ready answer. But no one recovers through opinions gathered online, and maybe the real question isn't how to judge these bodies anymore, but why we still feel entitled to.

On the other hand, ignoring the question entirely would certainly protect the privacy of extremely exposed public figures, but it would also take away tools from the people who treat those figures, and those bodies, as an example and a target.