I am indifferent to Lucy Hale on most days. I think I’ve covered some interviews with her before, but I don’t even care enough to look them up? I trust that my general feeling towards her as always been “harmless/meh.” So I came into her Cosmopolitan cover interview cold, just seeing if there were any interesting quotes. There were! She’s sort of okay. Lucy turned 30 years old last year and she’s no longer in the business of playing high school teenagers. She’s all grown up and she has a new CW show called (I sh-t you not) Katy Keene. It’s an Archie spinoff and Cosmo describes is as, like, the 2020 version of Sex and the City? Maybe. Anyway, Lucy is aware that most people think of her the girl with a squeaky-clean image in teen soap operas. But she’s a lot more than that. She has tattoos! She has piercings! She chopped off her hair! You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
She’s getting six tattoos removed: An elephant (“I got it done out of the country and it was not done well”), a light bulb (“just over it”), and a Bible verse on her rib cage (“I’m not religious by any means at all anymore,” plus the “thick font” doesn’t vibe with the single-needle aesthetic she has on the rest of her body). Some of her surviving ink, for now: her grandmother’s handwriting on her arm, an evil eye, and a quote from the Insta poet Atticus: “Love her but leave her wild.”
She’s finally aged out of teen soap operas: “I’m finally at the point where I don’t have to audition for teenagers. It’s so nice. Looking back on it now, it’s like, Oh, that was really tough… You did feel like you had to uphold some sort of image. I’ve always been very petite, but over the course of eight years, my body changed. I gained a little bit of weight, and seeing how people reacted to that really messed with my head. I started getting all these stress-related, hormone-related breakouts,” she remembers. On days when her skin flared up, “they had this specialty light for me.”
She was so worried about what people thought of her: “I look back and I think of all the minutes and hours I’ve wasted upset over how I looked or something that was out of my control. I wish I could get that time back, although it has led me to where I’m at now…[At 30], It feels nice to just not give a f–k about certain things.
Chopping off eight inches of hair: “It was the most liberating thing I’ve ever done… I couldn’t tell you the amount of times when guys were like, ‘You should grow your hair out again. I like long hair.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not cutting my f–king hair for you.’ I cut my hair for me. And I feel great with it this way.”
She loves a bold lip too: “Or a lot of guys don’t like a bold lip color. I love a bold lip color. I don’t care. I don’t care! I truly don’t dress for men at all. I dress for me and what I think is cool.” Her preferred aesthetic is “a nontraditionally sexy look. More masculine stuff is really cool to me. I’ve never been the girl who’s like, ‘Ooh, tighter, lower, shorter.’ I constantly want to dress like an Olsen twin.”
She’s not in a rush to settle down: “When I was younger, I was constantly wanting to be with or date someone because I was so deathly afraid of being single or by myself. Now, I’m at the point where if I meet someone, they better really elevate my life, because I love being single.” (Her family plans? Also on hold. Lucy sidebarred that she loves her Kyleena IUD because “I don’t want kids for a while.”)
She’s into nice guys now, not bad boys: “I used to be really drawn to, like, damaged people who had been through some sh-t. Now, I’m like, You can be nice but not boring. Nice but not a dud.”
She tried Raya (the dating app for celebs): “John Mayer is on there. And I pressed yes for him, but I don’t think he pressed yes for me…. I’m so drawn to musical talent, I don’t care.”
The fact that she talks about moving away from bad boys and wanting a nice guy and then IN THE NEXT BREATH talks about pressing yes for John Mayer, well. Not that John Mayer is a “bad boy.” He is not. He’s just awful. He’s awful to the women he dates and he does it under the guise of being a broody bluesman. Don’t do it, Lucy! Anyway, she sounds… like so many of the starlets these days. Judging Millennials solely by celebrity interviews, I feel like it’s a very Millennial experience for one’s 20s to be absolute garbage. And then every Millennial is like “yay, my 30s, finally!” Also: who knew Lucy Hale had tons of ink?
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, cover courtesy of Cosmo.
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