Sam Claflin Shares His Struggles with Body Image in Shirtless Scenes: “I Feel Insecure”
Despite more than 15 years in the film industry, actor Sam Claflin continues to grapple with insecurities about his on-screen appearances.
The Golden Globe nominee recently opened up about his feelings of insecurity during an episode of the Happy Place podcast. He recalled the anxiety he faced when he was unexpectedly required to go shirtless early in his career, saying, “A lot of the roles I played earlier on in my career… I had a topless scene in one of my first movies, but it wasn’t in the script and I got told a week before they were going to [take] my top off. I was like, ‘sh*t, I haven’t been working out, what am I going to do?’ This is my first introduction to the world.”
Claflin further revealed his ongoing struggles with self-image: “I’m incredibly insecure. I just went to a screening of a film I was in and everyone immediately afterwards [asked], ‘How was it?’ And ‘I hated it.’ It’s my face, I don’t like [it].”
In a previous interview with The Telegraph, Claflin described how he quickly developed body dysmorphia after his film debut as Philip Swift in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). He noted, “There is this Hollywood assumption that it’s the men with the six packs who sell the movie. So there was a pressure that that was what I needed to look like.”
