Nia Vardalos is determined not to fit the Hollywood mould

May 2024 · 8 minute read

She was famous for her curves, then she lost 40lb – but not to pander to the skinny blonde Hollywood stereotype. Actress Nia Vardalos she tells Chrissy Iley, not fitting in is a good thing

Nia Vardalos

'I was labelled with words like overweight - but just say fat. I love the word fat,' says Nia Vardalos

Nia Vardalos is floating about her Beverly Hills hotel suite in a cobalt blue chiffon minidress. She has just moisturised her legs, which look long and thin. Her cheekbones jut out. She is impressively skinny, something she never thought she’d be.

Curves were Nia’s trademark. That’s what we all empathised with when she became an unexpected star with the charming My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the 2002 low-budget romantic comedy that she wrote and in which she starred with John Corbett.

One of the biggest-grossing independent movies of all time, it was about a Greek woman who fell in love with a non-Greek whose family struggled to accept the situation while she struggled to accept her own heritage. Being Greek and chunky is what Nia was most famous for.

Nia is still resolutely Greek (despite living in Los Angeles), but she is now svelte and sculpted. She lost 40lb on her doctor’s orders after he diagnosed a blood-sugar problem, and her new look is a physical manifestation of the way her whole life has completely turned around in the past year. She has a longed-for daughter, she’s directed her first film, and there’s a new air of contentment about her.

Her latest movie, Driving Aphrodite (directed by Donald Petrie of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Miss Congeniality), was filmed in Athens – the first time a crew had gained permission to shoot at the Pantheon and the Acropolis – and in one scene a couple make a wish for a child at the Oracle of Delphi.

‘That moment was based on me,’ she admits. ‘We added that to the film, because while I was there I asked for a child and my wish was granted.’ Tears start to fall slowly. She was in the process of waiting to be matched with her adopted daughter when shooting this movie, and it had been a moment long in coming. 

Nia Vardalos

Nia with John Corbett in My Big Fat Greek Wedding

‘I didn’t know when this horrible waiting period would be over. So yes, I asked the Oracle, and amazingly I got the call during filming. I had only 14 hours’ notice; they said, “You’ve been matched, can you come back to America tomorrow?” My husband and I definitely weren’t prepared. But this little girl is such perfection.’

When her daughter (whose name she wants to keep private) joined Nia and her husband, actor Ian Gomez, last year she was three years old; Nia was 45. She still has the glow of a new mother. There is elation in the way she talks about blowing bubbles in the garden and decorating her daughter’s bedroom pink. ‘You know, I’d really built up being a mother after ten years of trying – and it’s ten times better than I ever expected.’

Nia and Ian met at Chicago improvisational theatre company the Second City; she says she knew instantly that this was ‘the one’, and they have been married since 1993, when they moved to LA. But despite all the accolades of her career – an Oscar nomination for writing My Big Fat Greek Wedding; a spin-off hit TV series, My Big Fat Greek Life, and the movie Connie and Carla with David Duchovny, in which she played a woman pretending to be a man dressing up as a woman – she’d been haunted by her unfulfilled desire to be a mother.

‘The ten years of not being able to have a child came with an immense sense of shame,’ she explains. ‘For about two years I went through complete withdrawal from the public eye. There was a feeling that I’d failed at something, and that was new to me. But now I don’t feel that shame. It was when the script of Driving Aphrodite arrived that I realised I wanted to [return to acting].’

'I always felt beautiful. In my family, you were beautiful if you were funny’


In the past Nia was always sexily curved, so women identified with her. But now men lust after her. She’s not just beautiful, she’s Hollywood beautiful. When she first arrived in California she used to say she was invisible, ‘Because I was not skinny and not 22 years old.

‘But I did feel beautiful. I felt “everywoman beautiful”. My family never put a value on being thin.’ She grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, where her parents and younger sister still live (she also has a sister in Toronto and a brother in Australia). Her mother was a homemaker and book-keeper; her dad was an entrepreneur who sold cars and developed land.

‘You were beautiful if you were funny, and everybody in my family is funny, therefore beautiful.’

Certainly today she carries herself with supreme confidence. I wonder if her presence was always so commanding. I suspect it was. She is a person who overcomes obstacles, rather than letting them weigh her down.

‘I was labelled with words like overweight – but just say fat. I love the word fat. So you’re fat, big deal. Everybody used to ask me, why did I have fat in the title, and I was always saying, “Fat is not a bad word.” Am I beautiful now because I am thin? I am the same person. I had a blood-sugar problem – it wasn’t about losing weight, it was about getting healthy.’

Nia Vardalos Nia Vardalos

With husband, actor Ian Gomez; as tour guide Georgia in her current
film Driving Aphrodite

So what was the magic diet? ‘I did everything in moderation, and followed the food-balancing methods of the Zone diet; so if I ate a bit of fruit I would have it with protein. I did break up with cheese during the process, though I’m now able to eat it again. I don’t believe in cutting everything out.’

Since her daughter arrived, Nia’s attitude to work has completely changed. When she was trying to get the script for My Big Fat Greek Wedding – based on her own one-woman stage show – made into a movie, producers only wanted to option it if it was My Big Fat Italian Wedding, or My Big Fat Hispanic Wedding, and without her playing the lead part.

Even her then agent said, ‘You being Greek is the problem.’ So she and the agent parted ways and Nia continued to write the movie (‘from 10am to 10pm every day’), refusing to relinquish her ethnicity. And in the end she didn’t have to, because Rita Wilson – also of Greek heritage – and her husband Tom Hanks came and saved the day as producers. 

She seems super-relaxed, yet the characters she plays always veer towards the obsessive. In Driving Aphrodite she is Georgia, a woman who has lost her way. She’s frustrated with life, frustrated with love, waiting for her big chance as an academic and in the meantime earning a living as a tour guide around Athens at the helm of a dilapidated coach. Her love interest is played by the delicious Alexis Georgoulis, who is a huge star in Greece. The funny woman gets the beautiful boy – as you’d expect from the charismatic Nia.

Nia Vardalos

Teaming up with John Corbett again in her forthcoming film I Hate Valentine's Day

Her own love life has not been without its traumas. ‘I had three guys in a row dump me for a skinny blonde girl. In one case, he met the other girl at a party we were both at and took her home, and I then had to go to his apartment to get my bicycle. How humiliating, knocking on his door: “Can I have my bike back?” I had so many bad dates. But what doesn’t kill you makes you laugh, and that definitely forms my comedy.

‘In movies I like to show good female relationships. My girlfriends are a very big part of my life. I don’t believe in movies that have the man cheating on the woman then winning her back. What kind of message are we sending to the next generation? In Driving Aphrodite [for which she contributed to the script], all the women support each other, and that’s the message that I’m sending to the audience.’

Next up on the work front is a chick flick romcom called I Hate Valentine’s Day, which
she wrote and directed, and which reunited her with John Corbett.
‘I did I Hate Valentine’s Day with tiny finances. I would like to see what I could do with a real budget. But I would like to pursue acting and writing as well. I don’t believe in categorising myself in any way.

‘People seem to think I’ve had this charmed life, that I was plucked from obscurity by Tom Hanks. But it’s not like I just knocked on his door. I wrote that script out of necessity because I couldn’t get a job, and the message I was trying to send out there and am trying to send still is, “Don’t take no for an answer.” If women come to Hollywood and they are told they don’t fit in, I am here to whisper in their ears – guess what, that’s a good thing.’

Driving Aphrodite is in cinemas nationwide

 

 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3IpbCmmZmhe6S7ja6iaKCforJwxc6uZpqqpJ6wrbGMamlqb2Rqg3CayJpkj5mima6tu9Jmm56slae6qrrEnWSfoaRilbC4y7KuqKeUYrqwwcudZaGsnaE%3D