Troian Bellisario Dishes On Her Decision To Revisit Her Eating Disorder With 'Feed'

Having an eating disorder is a huge deal; it’s an illness that you truly never get over — and Troian Bellisario found that out while working on her movie, Feed.

In a new feature with Interview magazine, the actress opened up about her decision to revisit the past and tell the story of her own battle with anorexia.

“There was this emptiness in me that I wanted to, not fill, but engage,” she says. “I felt like there was a story in me that hadn’t been told, and it was a very personal story and it came from a point in my life when I felt like I had experienced something.”

Troian, like many others, felt like no one truly understood what she went through — and she’s right. No one, unless it’s another who is having the same struggles, will understand.

“Still to this day, I couldn’t get anyone — even the people who loved me the most, even my boyfriend or my mother or my father — to understand what that experience was truly like for me,” she says. “It was about my eating disorder, and I found there were so many people who thought that it was about losing weight or being skinny, and I couldn’t quite get them to understand that it was about control on a very, very literal level.”

Troian adds about her decision to revisit the past: “It was not easy; it was like engaging with an addiction. One of the things I really wanted the film to explore was that once you have this relationship, once you have this mental illness or this disease, it never really goes away.”

“My neural pathways were all still there and connected to the disease, so when I had engage with the film, it was like poking a sleeping dragon. It was amazing for me to realize, ‘Oh god, this is still all just lying under the surface. I’ve just gotten really good at either ignoring it or choosing to not engage with it.’”