This article contains references to eating disorders, assault, and suicidal ideation.
Jameela Jamil sashays into Dean Street Townhouse dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder Charo Ruiz top and mini skirt, her long legs tucked into brown calf-length cowboy boots. Her thick fringe rests firmly on her long eyelashes, eyes adorned with her trademark black, flicked eyeliner. She is beautiful, but also goofy and geeky; like a newborn foal not quite sure where to put their limbs. She has a filthy and dark sense of humour, which she uses frequently to provoke uncomfortable conversations on a variety of topics including her paedophile school teacher, sexual assault, being a troll, abortion and deepfake abuse. But more on these later.
She is back living in the UK after a few years in LA, where she starred in The Good Place and the Marvel series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, while becoming one of Instagram’s biggest social commentators. Amidst being cancelled and then being reborn for her outspokenness, there is much to discuss, but we start light, on the subject of her beauty regime. Although anyone who follows Jameela on Instagram or has heard her podcast I Weigh will know, her appearance is the least interesting thing about her, but I’m curious: why was she so insistent on doing her own makeup, without a makeup artist, for the GLAMOUR shoot? We had days of toing and froing before she agreed to letting us use a professional.
“I’m a funny fish about being touched by anyone but my boyfriend [singer James Blake],” she says. “I don’t have massages, I don’t have manis or pedis, I’ve never had a facial, I always did my own makeup on the set of The Good Place. But – and this isn’t meant to be some big political statement, because I love makeup and hair – I just don’t want to spend any more time on my appearance than my boyfriend does. In everything I’ve ever filmed, the girls come in an hour and 45 minutes early; the boys come in 25 minutes early. That’s an hour and 45 minutes less sleep that women are getting, but we have to be just as funny on no energy, have no health problems, be perfect all the time, look young forever and not gain weight.”
Basically America Ferrera’s speech in Barbie? “Exactly. So I told the producers, ‘I’ll do my own makeup because I’m really quick and it will take me 10 to 20 minutes’. So I did.”
Yes, it’s hard not to agree with her sentiment, but the balls on this woman.
“Also, I don’t want to set standards for myself that I’m not going to be able to keep,” she continues. “I know I’m hard on myself, so it’s important for me not to give myself new ways to fail. So if I tell myself, ‘You better not gain weight’, then gaining weight feels like a failure and as women, we are already made to feel that from the minute we’re born, we’re already failing at everything.”
Did I say we started light?
Welcome to the world of Jameela Jamil: direct; uncompromising; with a brain that seems to never sleep, constantly probing, questioning and analysing both herself and the universe around her. She’s left-field, and one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. She’s never afraid to speak her mind (sometimes to her own detriment), nor to speak up for women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s with her activism in mind that she has been awarded the 2024 GLAMOUR Woman of the Year ‘Gamechanging Voice’ Award.
Now 38, Jameela has been in the public eye since she was 22, when she was approached in a Soho pub by a TV scout. Within a week, she was hosting a pop culture show for T4, previously part of Channel 4, and would soon become one of the UK’s most well-known presenters. She was born in London, the youngest child of Pakistani and Indian parents. She was born with congenital hearing loss and labyrinthitis, a type of inner ear infection, which still affects her hearing today. Aged 8, she moved to Karachi, Pakistan for a short period, and then to Spain where her grandmother lived because her family “had run out of money”. By the time she was a teenager, her family had moved into a council flat in Hampstead (“God bless the government at the time,” she says). While she was growing up, Jameela attended a primary school where, it has been widely reported, one of the teachers was a paedophile. “Garry Glitter was allowed to come into my school,” she says. “It was on the news; it was terrible.”
“Bloody hell,” I say. Was she okay? “He never touched me,” she assures me. “I was fine, but also I looked, like, 25 years old by the time I was nine. I had full tits and a beard by the age of 10. I’m very grateful for that, I’d definitely recommend,” she jokes.
It’s typical of Jameela to make a wild joke out of a bad situation in her life, but also to pull herself down. She was, however, assaulted by a stranger, aged 12, while walking down London’s Oxford Street at 3.30pm. “He grabbed me by the crotch until I nearly bled, and I’ve been hyper-vigilant for every day of my life since. From the second I wake up, I’m thinking about safety without realising it, doing ‘death maths’.”
She says she was a “very academic” child but puts her interest in studying down to being badly bullied at school. “If you don’t have any friends, what else are you going to do other than study?”, she says matter-of-factly. “Also, I’m South Asian – [culturally] you have to get 100% on everything. My family are very academic, especially on my mother’s side. Everyone went to Cambridge, Yale or Harvard. They put a lot of pressure on themselves. It shaped me, in that I saw how unhappy it made everyone. So it [academic success] felt very arbitrary to me. I completely divorced myself from the idea of success.”
She says her family were horrified when, aged 19, she decided not to do her A Levels, instead going to work in a local video shop; the same job she’d had when she was 15. “I loved that job,” she says, “it’s still one of my favourite jobs I’ve ever had. I got to watch movies all day and I loved to take stock of the product, stacking and organising – organising is my mindful porn. If we ever have a party now, James knows I’ll be up until 5am. The party starts for me when it ends for everyone else. I live for tidying up.” Is her home spotless? “No, because I live with men and dogs.”
Until recently, she was living in LA with James and two other flatmates; James and Jameela moved there in 2015, and their flatmates followed two years later. Isn’t it quite unusual, in a long-term relationship, to still be living with two flatmates? “I know, but I think it’s becoming less unusual”, she says. “We’re in a cost of living crisis, and it was so much more financially sensible for us all to live together, and we got a much nicer place. One is a musician; the other a photographer. None of us had 9-5 jobs. So we could play Bananagram or Scrabble at 3pm on a Thursday afternoon.” It felt like reliving her youth, Jameela says, as she didn’t go to university and immediately started working and supporting her family financially when she was a teenager.
For someone who speaks so openly on most topics, she is protective when talking about her family. She has a brother 10 years older than her, Adnandus, who she feels she “owes everything to”.
“He raised me in a world of David Bowie, Star Trek and The Beatles,” she says. “He’d play creative games with me, where he’d cover whole rooms in tin foil and wrap me in a sleeping bag, put a hairdryer on and roll me around the floor to pretend I was travelling in time.” She credits her brother for her vivid imagination that helped her mentally escape from their difficult childhood. “My brother was so happy when I was silly,” she says, “it made me want to be silly for the rest of my life, to cheer people up. That’s why I’m in comedy.”
She also credits her difficult childhood for her well-documented anorexia and, in her own words, ‘strong suicidal ideation’ (which she “only really got over in the last few years”), as well as why she ultimately became a fierce advocate for women’s issues, especially around body image. She says she understood how it felt to be on the outside; to feel like “you’re not good enough and too ugly to be loved,” she reflects. “I knew what it felt like to feel so far away from the standard of what you’re supposed to be in every way as a human being. And it really brutalised my confidence as a child. They were supposed to be my innocent years; not years of self-destruction. And so I’ve spent until now, aged 38, making it up to that 12-year-old for every horrible thing I did to her, and let her do to her body. I have tried to atone by stopping the same things happening to other 12-year-olds that happened to me. Everything I do for women is to say ‘sorry’, or to go back and fix what happened to me then.” She adds: “I’m not going to have children of my own, so this is my gift. This is the thing I’m going to create and put out into the world.”
It’s not the first time I’ve heard her say she doesn’t want children. I ask when she knew she didn’t want to become a mother. “I’ve just never been maternal”, she shrugs. “I’ve never wanted children. It’s such a gift to know that about yourself. A lot of people do it because they think they should, or they’re fear-mongered into thinking they’ll regret it if they don’t. Most women have a nurturing aspect, me included; mine just isn’t inclined towards babies. It’s inclined towards supporting the women who have the babies, who have everything dumped on them.”
She speaks out on this topic specifically to highlight “this arbitrary belief that a woman has no value if she’s not a mother. We don’t question men in the same way.”
Has she ever felt the need to share her views on motherhood with who she’s dating? “I’m just always shocked that anyone wants to have sex with me,” she laughs. “But no, it’s never been an issue in relationships. It’s only ever come up in conversation with James who I’ve been with for 10 years.”
She met James in the Live Lounge at Radio One 10 years ago. I say I know very little about them as a couple. “We tend not to talk about our relationship a lot because once you open that door you can’t close it, and the public feel ownership of you,” she says. “The only time I ever choose to share things about myself publicly is if I think it will be helpful to someone else. If I think, ‘This isn’t being said enough, or someone might be feeling alone in this feeling’, then I’ll share my experience. I get thousands of really personal DMs a week from people sharing their struggles. I don’t find it embarrassing to speak about things; I seem to have missed the shame gene. So I’ll just drop a grenade and talk on a subject unapologetically. Whether it’s about not wanting children, or wanting to have an abortion because having a child is not the right thing for you, there’s no need to apologise for it.”
In 2019, she shared on Twitter, now X, that she’d had an abortion when she was younger, in response to draconian abortion laws being reinstated in the US which banned abortions after a heartbeat was detectable, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy when most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. Jameela tweeted that the law was ‘upsetting, inhumane, and blatantly demonstrative of a hatred of women’. What was the response? “Overwhelmingly positive,” she tells me. “But obviously militant anti-choice people were very angry because I said that having an abortion was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. But then I took it back and said, ‘Actually, cutting a fringe was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, and my abortion was my second-best decision’. And that made them much angrier.”
There she goes again; that dark, antagonistic humour. It must get her into so much trouble? “So much of what I say is tongue-in-cheek. But unfortunately, that doesn’t always come across in writing, especially when I was on Twitter [she came off the platform when Elon Musk took over in 2022], people couldn’t hear my tone of voice. That’s what’s great about Instagram – there are more videos. And also on my podcast, where I’ve spoken most personally about myself, and they [listeners] can tell when I’m being sarcastic. I’ve learned there are other ways to give my opinion without being antagonistic.”
She comes across publicly as someone who would never allow wrongdoing to be left alone, so I’m surprised when she tells me her response to having been deepfaked (when an image or video is digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness with another, usually pornographically). Jameela only found out she’d been deepfaked last year, when a TV channel rang her up and told her as part of a documentary they’re making on the topic. She says she’s doing nothing about it. “It [the video] is fake,” she says. “And I find it so deeply cringe of men to do this. I refuse to turn it into a thing that I fear, which is what they want. The men who are making these videos are getting off on the fact we’re upset.” She won’t give them power. “It’s so sad that they’re in their basement taking videos of my face and putting it on someone else’s tits and vagina. You get one life and there’s all these things you could do instead, yet they choose to sit in the dark doing this. That’s not a shame on me. The shame’s on them.”
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But rather than hating them, Jameela says she feels sorry for them. “That’s not who they thought they’d be when they were eight years old and thought, ‘I’m going to be a fireman or a scientist’. Who took away all their power that they felt the need to do that?” She feels the same about the people who troll her. “The question is, ‘What do we need to do to fix society to genuinely help these people?’ Something’s wrong. The way we are handling boys and men in our society is not working. I really mean that.”
When it comes to finding power from online harm, she says she’s talking from personal experience, because as she admits: “I used to be a troll because I was fucking miserable, and it was my way of feeling a shot of power.” Most famously, she called out Kim Kardashian on Twitter in 2018, calling her a ‘terrible and toxic influence on young girls’ for promoting appetite-suppressing lollipops, adding: ‘This family makes me feel actual despair over what women are reduced to’.
It certainly seems as though Jameela has been doing some soul-searching around the topic of calling people out for their behaviour. Would she do it differently now?
“Yeah, I already do it differently. I think before I speak now, and with more nuance. I could never have known that one fuck-off tweet about the Kardashians was going to go viral. I didn’t have that many Twitter followers, I was brand new to America, I’d been off the scene for years. I’m an interviewer, so I never considered myself a celebrity. I was shooting at a target that I never thought I was going to…”, she trails off. “Well, I never thought I was going to move to LA and date a musician.”
Did she not come across the Kardashians in LA?
“No, never. I barely go out, I’m a homebody.” But there were others? “Yeah… I have been to the Grammys with James, and I was like, ‘Oh hell, I tweeted about you, I talked about you on the radio.’”
She says she has regretted so much of what she’s said and has apologised multiple times to people. “Apologising is a relief; it’s a strength.”
Do I detect a softening in Jameela?
“I have learned to communicate very intentionally. I realised I spoke to people in a way that came across as condescending at times, and I used very inelegant language. I was very vulgar. And those things are fine, but I’ve never learned by someone making me feel like I’m an idiot or a bad person for not knowing something.
“Over the course of the pandemic,” she says, “I started to see the way that people treated each other, and it shocked me. It made me realise I have a footprint here in how people speak to each other with such impatience, because I’ve been celebrated for my clap-backs and put-downs. It’s actually almost never the right way to communicate. I’m trying to fathom how to give the benefit of the doubt. We would always hope to be given it by others, but we are not taught to reserve it for others. I used to be deeply problematic and will continue to have problematic moments. But I’ve watched my own transformation. I’m only still here because of the grace and forgiveness of millions of people. But also, when you learn there is life after the death of public approval, you are free.”
We’ve been talking for three hours. My preordered taxi has been and gone. Our tea has twice gone cold. She walks me to the tube station (we get papped), and an elderly gentleman stops her for a photo in the street. Not, apparently, because she’s famous (he didn’t seem to know who she was), but because he wanted a photo with a woman that beautiful.
“Does that happen to you all the time?” I ask. “Yes”, she shrugs. “One for his wank bank.” We cackle the whole way down the street.
On a more serious note, she tells me she is excited to be officially launching ‘Move For Your Mind’ this month, a radically inclusive exercise programme for anyone looking to reap the mental health benefits of movement in a fun, supportive environment. Jameela tells me people are often excluded from exercise “because of rampant fatphobia, ableism, racism and a general elitism that exists within the exercise industry, which feels more married to the diet industry than ever before”. These events – including an upcoming virtual session with Jameela and her trainer, Al Jackson; and a community self-defence walk in London on October 29th – are a safe space for those who want to find joy, rather than punishment, in moving their bodies.
As we’re saying goodbye, she adds: “You know how I told you that everything I do is to atone for my 12-year-old self? Well, I feel I’ve achieved that. I feel I blew all the whistles. I healed the eating disorder. I said I was sorry to her. And I get letters from so many women telling me I’ve helped them, too. So now, everything I do is for the 85-year-old me. Everything I eat, every walk I go on, every holiday I take and every shag I have. I want her to look back and thank me, because all I’ve ever done is look back and say sorry. And now I’m done with that.”
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