Kristin Davis Gets Candid About Body Image, Aging and Unhealthy Habits in ’90s Hollywood

When it comes to on-screen characters who have developed into a colloquial personality archetype in the larger, cultural zeitgeist, Charlotte York is one of the first to come to mind. One of the most iconic characters of the past several decades, Kristin Davis’s Charlotte York is pretty much the OG-trad wife, but Davis herself is anything but. Never one to shy away from difficult topics, in a recent sit down with People, Davis opened up this week about her struggles with unrealistic body standards at the beginning of her career, and how her sobriety helped her overcome these challenges.

Davis Talks ’90s Beauty Standards

“Well, here’s a story I’ve never told,” Davis began. She detailed her experience booking the role of Brooke Armstrong on Melrose Place, and how it was incredibly formative to her journey as an actress. But it came with its pitfalls too. “There was a general vibe on the set, though, that was difficult, about the thinness situation,” she said. “Every single person was gorgeous and super skinny. So I was like, ‘This is what I have to do.’”

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Davis revealed that the situation prompted her to hire a running coach. She also participated in back-to-back 90-minute spin classes regularly. “I’m sure I wasn’t eating,” she admitted. “I’d be so lightheaded that I fainted in a parking lot one time. Sometimes, I couldn’t remember my name.” Soon after, Davis began her sobriety journey, which she credits a large part of her health and well-being today.

A former NewBeauty cover star, Davis told us back in 2022 that comparison and body shaming played a part in her Sex and the City experience, too. “I also became famous when magazines were king, and every week there’d be an article saying I was ‘pear-shaped,’” she explained in her NewBeauty cover story. “That was difficult, and no amount of working out could change my shape or how those articles were written…they just loved to compare me to Sarah Jessica, who, at the same time, no matter what she did, was always going to be a very tiny thing.”

And the scrutiny wasn’t just from the media. “One time, right when we started filming in the olden days, I was walking home from set and I stopped at the corner bodega to buy some M&M’s, which is my go-to stress food. I go to pay, and the woman behind the register said, ‘I can’t sell these to you,’” she recalls, “I thought she was going to say she was kidding, but she didn’t, so I left that bodega and went to the next bodega down the block, and I bought four big bags of M&M’s and I ate them all. It was just very stressful back in the day…we had the extreme body stress, but now we have the age stress. Both were, and are, very hard things to deal with.”