One story is this: Rebel Wilson is among the best that Australia has brought to screens and streaming services in recent years. The 42-year-old actress is cool, elegant and funny.
She appeared in 2011’s marriage horror comedy Bridesmaids, coached an uptight New York woman on how to be single in How to be Single, and starred around the a cappella group in all three parts of the comedy Pitch Perfect The Barden Bellas at a US university. Between 2012 and 2017, Wilson was the “Fat Amy,” calling herself “Fat Amy” so the “skinny bitches” don’t do it behind her back, as she puts it. Amy isn’t just shrill and bubbly, but has a very serious dryness that makes her all the more comical. In the 2019 comedy Isn’t It Romantic, Wilson continues the stereotype of the funny fat girl who is liked for her advice but tends to be overlooked by potential sexual partners. After an attack, Natalie alias Wilson suddenly wakes up in a kind of parallel world in which she seems hot and desirable to others.
The best thing about Wilson is that she even manages to extract dignity and depth from the stereotype of the funny fat girl, and of course a lot of wit. As if she’s tricking the cliché, which doesn’t make the cliché any better, but makes it easier to bear.
Wilson apparently wanted to forestall an outing by the newspaper
Otherwise, Rebel Wilson is dating women. And so the other story begins: Wilson got through The Sydney Morning Herald, one of the leading Australian daily newspapers, which is not suspected of being tabloids, felt pressured to come out.
The story can be gleaned from tweets, posts and contributions on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald reconstruct as follows: On Friday, Wilson shared a photo on Instagram that showed her with her friend Ramona Agruma. She wrote, “I thought I was looking for the Disney prince, but maybe what I’ve needed all along is a Disney princess.” All not entirely voluntary, apparently she wanted an outing by the Sydney Morning herald anticipate.
Rebel Wilson manages to elicit dignity even from clichéd roles. Here on the Red Carpet in 2020.
(Photo: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP)
Columnist Andrew Hornery had planned to cover Wilson’s new relationship in his weekly Saturday column on the rich and famous. Wilson has already shared many pictures with partner Agruma, he wrote in an email last week to her management, and while she hasn’t made anything official, he shared, “I have multiple sources confirming her relationship status and I have enough details to publish.” He wanted to give her the opportunity to comment on the new love and gave her a deadline of almost a day and a half. For a private life turned inside out, that’s extremely short. The message went unanswered, instead Wilson posted her princess herself.
The fact is that actors also benefit from the stage that the media give them. Ideally, this is a reasonably fair trade, private information for public. Something obviously went wrong here.
In the Saturday column, which can no longer be accessed, Hornery expressed his displeasure, according to media reports, as if her truth had preempted his research. Wilson commented on Twitter the day after this column: “It was a very difficult situation, I try to handle it with dignity.”
The editor-in-chief apologizes, nothing was meant badly
While Editor-in-Chief Bevan Shields the column and the Research still defended on Sunday – they only asked questions and set a deadline for answering them in accordance with journalistic standards – the newspaper rowed back at the beginning of the week after heavy criticism. The editors took the column offline and are now expressing concern and purification. To this end, Andrew Hornery gets directly personal: “As a gay man, I am well aware of how painful discrimination is.” He never wanted to cause that pain in anyone else, but assumed that Wilson might be “happy” to discuss her new love with him. The deadline was not a threat. Also Editor-in-Chief Bevan Shields wrote to readers again on Tuesdaythe herald is an “inclusive newspaper and an ally of LGBTIQ+ readers and Australians”, he acknowledges the mistake, apologizes, one has learned something new.
On the one hand, the story shows how little stars today are still dependent on classic newspapers, how much they can now determine the course of the stories about themselves. On the other hand, although it is a story with a princess and a happy love ending, it is also a media story that knows no winners. A forced out actress, a failed editor, a newspaper in the crossfire.
So back to Rebel Wilson, the actress. Have you seen “Senior Year” on Netflix, in which Wilson plays a comatose cheerleader trying to be prom queen twenty years out of high school?