In her new three-part Netflix documentary, Victoria Beckham talks about her infamous interview with Chris Evans in 1999 when he forced her to weigh herself on national TV, two months after giving birth to her first son Brooklyn.
To be clear, we’re talking about Chris Evans, 56, a titan of the British TV presenting and radio DJ spots in the Nineties, who looks a little like an ageing Ron Weasley — and not Chris Evans, 41, bankable Hollywood star and Marvel’s Captain America.
VB, the artist formerly known as Posh Spice, discussed the media’s obsession with her weight as well as her own struggles with disordered eating in her Netflix documentary – something that was not helped by Evans’ insistence she weigh herself on primetime TV.
Cast your minds back to 1999. In a moment of peak Nineties misogyny, Evans, then host of Channel 4’s Friday night chat show TFI Friday, insisted Victoria, who had her first son, Brooklyn, with David Beckham just two months before, weigh herself live on air. Something he made other women do too, btw.
As David watched on from the live TV audience, Evans told her: ‘A lot of girls want to know, because you look fantastic again, how did you get back to your shape after birth?’ After replying that she hadn’t worked out at all, Chris refused to drop it, demanding: ‘Is your weight back to normal?’
When she said it was, he persisted: ‘Can I check, do you mind?’, getting her to step on to some scales and remarking: ‘Eight stone’s not bad at all, is it?’
Obviously, Victoria hasn’t forgotten. Would you? ‘I went on a TV show with Chris Evans many years ago and I’d just had Brooklyn and lost a lot of weight after,’ she told Vogue Australia in 2022.
‘It happened to my mum after her pregnancies. It doesn’t mean you have an eating disorder. And he made me stand on the scales to be weighed. Can you imagine doing that nowadays?’
The media’s obsession with weight — especially hers — has followed VB. ‘I’ve had ‘Porky Posh’, I’ve had ‘Skeletal Posh’. After I had Brooklyn, there was a picture pointing to every single part of my body where I had to focus on losing the weight from.’
And, appallingly, she still receives snide remarks from all corners. Three Michelin star chef Dani Garcia, 46, claimed the Spice Girl had ‘changed the whole menu’ when former Real Madrid star Sergio Ramos tied the knot with his model and TV presenter wife Pilar Rubio in Spain in 2019. ‘She had coconut water, all the time, a bowl of mints and then on the other side hydroalcoholic gel which is very famous now but back then wasn’t because the Covid pandemic hadn’t started.’
Speaking to MailOnline, a source close to Victoria said: ‘This makes a great story but isn’t fair or accurate – the most Victoria would have done when asked about dietary requirements is ask for some plain fish and vegetables.’
The subject comes up again in the docu-series, which tackles her mistreatment in the media head on, as Victoria reflected on her time going to auditions during theatre school and being told she ‘didn’t look like a lot of the other girls.’ She added, ‘That’s where I started getting a lot of criticism about my appearance, my weight. I remember the principle of the theatre school saying to me, you know, at the end of the show we are going to just fly in. “You girls can be flown in,” meaning that we weren’t looking as aesthetically pleasing as some of the others, “so we’ll just fly you in the back”.’
Victoria’s mother Jackie Adams also added that the star was told, ‘”You’re overweight. You’ll be at the back”.’Â She added: ‘It must have affected her, it’s a very silly thing to say to someone, “You’re fat”.’
