Actor and musician Olly Alexander opened up about his history with disordered eating and path to wellness in a new interview.
Ahead of the premiere of It’s a Sin, a new TV show about the AIDS crisis by Queer as Folk creator Russell T Davies, Alexander told The Guardian that he suffered from bulimia throughout his teenage years. The 30-year-old said his eating disorder was fueled by internalized homophobia and “self-loathing,” telling the U.K. newspaper that he “didn’t want to be gay.”
“It was something I could control,” he said of bulimia. “I felt very out of control in the rest of my life. I was struggling with my sexuality, my parents were divorcing, and I wanted to punish myself.”
Alexander, who is also frontman of the band Years and Years, said that he used to attempt to manifest his goal weight by repeatedly recovering his desires in his journal: “Don’t eat, don’t eat, don’t eat.” “I used to write that I really wanted to be skinny,” Alexander added. “My mantra was always: I’m not going to eat this again, I’m not going to eat cake again.”
According to Alexander, his struggles with positive body image continued well into his 20s and included a period of self-harm. He said that bulimia took a toll on his body, damaging his internal organs.
“I got taken into hospital once with my mom because I had this irregular heartbeat, which can happen through constant purging, and that really scared me,” the performer said. “I thought I’d done something irreparable to my body, and my mum was so distraught.”
“She couldn’t understand why her son was throwing up all the food she was trying to give him,” he continued. “She found out because I hadn’t cleaned the toilet properly.”
But after getting to a better place with his relationship to eating, Alexander has become a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ mental health. In an interview with The Guardian in 2016, he told journalist Owen Jones that paying attention to one’s mental health is just like caring for “any other part of your body.”
“Your mental health gets sick, and it needs treatment,” he said.
But despite the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues in the society at large, Alexander noted that there’s still a great deal of stigma in acknowledging it. “If you’re invited to a party, and you say ‘I’m sick, I can’t go’ — that’s totally accepted,” he said. “But if you say, ‘I’m having a depressive episode, I’ve got to stay in bed’ — that feels much harder to say.”
These conversations are extremely important to start, particularly for members of the LGBTQ+ community. A survey of LGBTQ+ youth by The Trevor Project and the National Eating Disorder Association found that 54 percent of respondents had struggled with disordered eating habits at some point in their lives and weren’t diagnosed. And despite the fact that LGBTQ+ people make up just 4.5% of the population, gay men account for an estimated 42 percent of all men who have a diagnosed eating disorder.
Luckily, Alexander’s new show appears to be ready to start even more critical dialogues among members of the community. It’s a Sin centers on the lives of three gay men coming of age during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The series co-stars Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), Stephen Fry (Wilde), and Keeley Hawes (Line of Duty).
Alexander, who has previously appeared in films like Enter the Void and Bright Star, plays Ritchie, an AIDS denier who must come to terms with the deadly illness decimating the community. He recently told talk show host Graham Norton that the material feels especially relevant in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We finished filming a year ago and then when the pandemic started happening… there were all these crazy rumors about where it came from, where it was ‘made,’” he told Norton on Friday. “My character was saying the same lines, and you know, this is a period show about the 80s! It blew my mind.”
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