Melanie Lynskey is opening up about a beloved friend.
While discussing the intense pressure actresses feel to look a certain way, the Yellowjackets star referenced back to her friendship with the late Brittany Murphy.
"I was friends with Brittany Murphy, and the way she viewed her self was always really heartbreaking to me—the things she felt she had to change to be a successful actor," Lynskey told InStyle Aug. 9. "She was perfect just as she was, but people were trying to cast her as, like, 'the fat one,' because when she was a very young teenager, her cheeks were a little bit round. People tell you that you're a particular thing, and it's very hard to fight back against."
Murphy passed away from pneumonia and anemia in December 2009 at the age of 32.
In January, Lynskey revealed that she had been body shamed on the set of Yellowjackets—which just earned her her first Emmy nomination—and she said the self-doubt is still present.
"It's such a struggle, always. I feel like I have two voices in my head," Lynskey revealed. "One of them is coming from my heart and my soul and what I know is right, and it's telling me, 'You're perfectly fine.' And then the other voice is just this little voice that's always been there that's like, 'What are you thinking? Thinking your body's OK. It's not OK. You have to change it, like, What are you thinking, doing a love scene? What are you thinking, being one of the leads of a show?'"
However, Lynskey finds support in her husband Jason Ritter and is working on being kinder to herself.
"It's a struggle within myself to just say, 'I feel beautiful.' My husband thinks I'm beautiful," she said. "And also we look like the majority of women in the world. We're healthy, you know? I think there's this weird shaming of anybody who's not, like, a size 2, and I'm just over it."
Season two of Yellowjackets is on the horizon—just don't expect Lynskey to reveal any enticing plot details.
"I know nothing. I think they've learned to make sure I don't know anything because I like to respond to people when people ask me questions!" Lynskey joked to E! News in July. "I think they're like, 'Don't give her any information that she could accidentally give out.'"
Lynskey acknowledged that Yellowjackets is part of a wave of shows that are bringing inclusivity, in many different ways, to the screen.
"I think the television landscape is so much more diverse in every way," she told E!. "I don't know if 10 years ago people would have been willing to put a show on TV that has so many women in prominent roles. Women playing roles that are not super likable. We're difficult and complicated in a lot of different ways. They're straight-up psychopaths!"