Before we had Hayden Panettiere, the Olsen Twins were the adorable child stars celebrity gossip sites loved to joke about turning 18.
Then they got sickly thin and began resembling ghosts, all the while dressing like a couple of freaks developing a love for trendy “fashion.”
As she prepares for her debut this month on Showtime’s dark comedy hit Weeds, Mary-Kate Olsen says she’s actually in good health.
“Mentally, physically, I feel pretty on top of my game right now,” she tells EW.com. “Talk to me next week, I don’t know. Today, I feel good.”
Mary-Kate, who turned 21 back in June, and who was treated for an eating disorder in 2004, admits she makes “conscious decisions every day of my life” to avoid being photographed by celebrity news people.
“I would love to be able to swim in the ocean in Malibu,” she says. “But that is asking for a bikini shot. That’s inviting something that I don’t want to happen. I don’t need to be on a ‘Who’s Skinny, Who’s Fat, Who’s Looking Healthy, Who’s Not Eating?’ list.”
Boo. Fricking. Hoo.
A regular Keira Knightley, the skinny Olsen twin also avoids photographers by steering clear of certain stores known to be frequented by celebrities.
She prefers to keep her wispy, brittle frame close to her huge bodyguards and having pals over for dinner instead of meeting them at restaurants.
Yet as her first episode of Weeds approaches on September 17 (Olsen plays Tara, an innocent, Christian girl who’s new to the town where the drug-dealing main character lives), she’s excited to prove herself as an actress.
“To say that I got to work with those people – with Mary-Louise Parker – is a great thing,” he said.
Seeing Mary-Louise Parker nude is a great thing, too.
Weeds marks a new direction for the former child star, who says that all the work she did growing up with her sister Ashley “wasn’t about acting” but rather “about pleasing other people and making kids smile.”
Lastly, Mary-Kate, who’s been dating Max Snow for about a year, admits acting isn’t always easy: “There’s definitely been times when I just turned to people and said, ‘I’m done, this is too much for me, this is too overwhelming.'”