Tara Reid thinks her acting career would have been “bigger” had she settled down and had a baby.
“I’m not married, I don’t have kids … and I think, in Hollywood, if you don’t have kids or you’re not married, you’re judged,” she told Derek Warburton for a Mr. Warburton Magazine interview. “So they still think you’re that party girl from 40 years ago.”
“But all of a sudden, if you have a kid and you get married, ‘Oh she grew up, she’s great,’” Reid, who appeared in the Marc Jacobs Heaven Campaign, continued.
The American Pie star, 47, explained that she hasn’t been able to shake her “bad girl” persona because she chose a life of freedom.
“What if you can’t have kids or what if you don’t want to get married?” she asked. “You can’t judge people on that anymore. And it’s the one thing that I think is really unfair about our society.”
She went on to name other Hollywood women — such as Chelsea Handler and Jennifer Aniston — who have also spoken out about the societal pressures of motherhood.
“If it’s meant to happen, it will happen but you can’t keep dragging people’s face in it. Like get over it, there are other things to talk about,” she continued. “I think people need to leave privacy alone when it comes to that degree of personal stuff.”
Despite her unconventional way of life, the actress noted she has “never been happier” as she is set to star in the new comedy series Walking In L.A.
The self-proclaimed “godmother of partying” was the It Girl from the late-90s to the early 2000s. That was until she was labelled as nothing but a surgery-obsessed party girl.
“I was the first one that kind of started this image, but the difference with me is that I never did sex tapes, I never did anything wrong,” she explained. “I never even got a speeding ticket.”
Reid said she “got punished” by the media for simply “popping bottles and having a great time,” making her take a step back from the spotlight.
“I was just on an attack,” she explained. “Anything I did was on tape, it was pretty awful. And that’s why I left. It wasn’t because I was just a girl, it was because I was an easy target.”
In 2021, Reid spoke to Page Six about the bullying she faced from toxic tabloids.
“I don’t think people really knew the real story about so many girls that were going through so much pain, and this wasn’t something that, you know, you could really talk about the time,” Reid told us at the time.
“And now, we’re so lucky that we’re developing to this stage where we can talk about it and we can talk about our feelings and we can make it better.”
This story originally appeared on Page Six and is republished here with permission