Jonah Hill Opens up About His Weight Issues on ‘Ellen’

Jonah Hill appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Friday, where he had an earnest conversation about his fluctuating weight over the years.

Hill has gotten a lot of attention for his changing size over the course of his career, as he has gone through periods of extreme fitness and poor health. Many have suggested that this has overshadowed his stellar acting to some degree, and Hill himself has sometimes avoided the topic. However, on Friday he was candid about his weight, as it related to his new free magazine titled Inner Children. It contains interviews with everyone from Behati Prinsloo, to Michael Cera to Hill’s own therapist, and he said that they were “some of the most meaningful conversations” he had ever had.

“I think everybody has a version of themselves… at some point in your life the person you’re trying to kind of hide from the world,” Hill said. “Even if you get success or you grow up or you become good looking or whatever, the things that you think will fix the thing, you kind of carry some part of that with you.”

This certainly rang true for Hill, who dedicated his magazine to his 14-year-old self. He admitted that he has only recently come to understand how much the constant chatter about his body has effected him over the years.

“I became famous in my late teens and then spent most of my young adult life listening to people say that I was fat and gross and unattractive. And it’s only in the last four years writing and directing my movie, Mid90s, that I’ve started to understand how much that hurt and got into my head,” he read straight from the magazine. “I really believe everyone has a snapshot of themselves from a time when they were young that they’re ashamed of. For me, it’s that 14-year-old overweight and unattractive kid who felt ugly to the world, who listened to hip-hop and who wanted so badly to be accepted by this community of skaters.”

Mid90s is Hill’s directorial debut. It follows a 13-year-old boy facing many of the same struggles Hill describes himself going through, and he said that it inspired his writing in the magazine. In the end, he said that he sees them more as companion pieces.

“What I found amazing about [the magazine] is it was really a companion piece to writing and directing Mid90s because, to me, this movie is about learning to love yourself and finding a community of people that accepts you and how imperfect life is,” Hill said. “It took a long time, honestly until right now, for me to come out as sort of the person, the artist, mind, what I represent, how I feel, how I’d like to be spoken to, how I speak to the world in a way that actually represents who I am as a person as opposed to me trying to be something else that I’m not.”

Mid90s debuted this weekend in U.S. theaters.