Debra Messing Claims NBC Pushed Her To Have Bigger Boobs For Will & Grace!

Debra Messing is spilling more tea about behind the scenes of Will & Grace.

While appearing on The Impact of Will & Grace: 25 Years Later event at The Paley Center for Media panel on Monday, the 54-year-old actress revealed the then-president of NBC wasn’t totally pleased with her appearance when the show started. How so? Debra said he pushed her to “have big boobs.” Because that’s what Will & Grace needed to succeed — big knockers. Sigh.

The guy may have been deluded, but he was serious — and powerful. He even began to implement some changes; Debra was given padded inserts during her “first fitting” as Grace Adler. However, she wasn’t a fan of the idea and had no problems fighting against it whatsoever! She shared on the panel:

“The very first fitting, they had the chicken cutlets to make me bigger. I just wasn’t a fan of like the whole idea of it.”

Instead of staying quiet, Debra spoke up and pushed back against the situation. She recalled:

“I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t need that. And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s the president of the network [saying this].’ And I said, ‘If he wants it, then he needs to come here and tell me to my face.’”

Damn! Good for her for standing up for herself! And her bravery paid off — the president did not, in fact, march down there to tell her he wanted her boobs to be bigger. And she went on to star in the hit sitcom for eight Emmy-winning seasons from 1998 to 2006 on NBC — and three more from 2017 to 2020. With no chicken cutlets.

And that wasn’t the only bump in the road she faced on the show. Debra has been very open about struggling with her body image during the early years of the series. She previously shared on the I Weigh with Jameela Jamil podcast:

“When I started Will & Grace I was a size 8, and what happened was, every time I would go in for a fitting, I couldn’t fit into clothes. Eighty percent of it I couldn’t fit into, and I would just leave hating my body and hating myself. I loved my costume designer, she would always say, ‘Don’t worry,’ and she would talk to her assistant and say, ‘OK, can you call over and get a larger size?’ And that was sort of the thing that was always on repeat all the time.”

Her negative feelings about her body only worsened when she attended the 2000 Emmy Awards, where she was nominated for Best Leading Actress in a TV Comedy. Rather than enjoying this huge moment in her career, Debra said she couldn’t stop comparing her body to the other stars on the red carpet:

“This was supposed to be the greatest time of my life, being nominated for Best Actress in a TV show I loved for an Emmy and walking on the red carpet I walked out and I immediately felt so incredible, and then I was standing next to all of these other actresses who were half my size, and I felt fat, and I felt ugly.”

So, so sad. She then went on a mission to lose weight. However, Debra admitted, she became “too skinny” at the time — going from a size eight to a size two. And she soon started to feel sick from trying to maintain her weight:

“My body just could not hold out. My adrenals crashed, I was exhausted and it just became clear to me that I couldn’t be healthy and a size 2 at the same time.”

It’s heartbreaking to hear Debra had some negative experiences during the early years of Will & Grace. Reactions to what she had to say, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments below.

[Image via MEGA/WENN, Will & Grace/Hulu]