Debby Ryan on "Insatiable," Mental Health, and the Pressure of Hollywood

Being in the spotlight never came naturally to Debby Ryan. As a child, the Alabama-born Texan was riddled with anxiety and a speech impediment (she had trouble saying r’s but later corrected it with the help of her aunt, a speech pathologist).

Debby came out of her shell when she discovered acting through her mom — a teacher who wrote and directed school plays. At age seven, Debby started playing in musicals at an American base in Germany, one of the many places she lived when her dad was working with the military.

“When I started engaging in it, I realized that it was the freest I felt, just hiding in plain sight,” she tells Teen Vogue.

Undertaking an entirely new persona while suspending her own felt like magic. So much so that by the time her family moved back to Texas, Debby knew she was passionate about it, but didn’t really start taking it seriously until she had her mom’s support. “She heard me praying one night, and I just was like, ‘Please let me do this. I really want to act,’ to God,” Debby remembers. Her mother realized then this wasn’t a childhood phase — it was the real deal.

After a Hasbro commercial, Debby made her official acting debut in the same vein as Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato: on the uber-popular children’s show Barney & Friends (the film Barney: Let's Go to the Firehouse soon followed). Then Disney — a prolific breeding ground for young talent — came calling. And the rest was history. Just before she turned 15, the starlet went on to play a series of roles on the network, including Bailey Pickett on The Suite Life on Deck (the spinoff of The Suite of Life Zack & Cody and where she first met Dylan and Cole Sprouse) before fronting her own series called Jessie. And now, she’s the star of a new provocative Netflix show, Insatiable. And while the Insatiable trailer stirred many reactions, one thing also emerged: Debby Ryan was entering a whole new chapter of her acting career.

Once Jessie ended in 2015, Debby decided to step out of the limelight to focus on personal projects. “It was a conscious choice for me to duck away and not do a lot of public-facing things while I created a body of work after Jessie that I was really proud of,” she says. After a while, Debby explains, she was ready to move on from Disney life. “Jessie is a little sarcastic and also aspirational, and she's a little dark and funny. [But] she's a 28-minute version of a story, wherein things work out in the end, which is not real life. And I think sometimes people forget that that is a very curated version of a story of a girl,” Debby says.

As any high-profile actor will tell you, navigating fame can be tricky. It’s why Debby is thankful to have a support system that continually helps her along the way. “I have incredible parents,” she says. “[They] always told me, ‘At any point, if you want to be done, we'll move back to Texas, [and] we will figure it out,’” should she have decided the L.A. acting life was not for her. She also credits friends like her Suite Life costars Cole and Dylan, who helped in those early years. “By the time I met them, they were really grounded,” she remembers. “They were like the last generation of people who were not famous to be famous. They just were doing what they loved and then going home.”

But even with all the support in the world, the pressure of the entertainment business can get to you. “It requires confidence and inspires confidence and perpetuates it, and [it] also has highlighted so many of my insecurities and has said to me, ‘Oh, you think you're insecure about that? Check this out,’” Debby says. “And then [there would be] 12 other things that I didn't know I should worry about.”

Debby is open about her battle with anxiety, which she’s experienced throughout the years. Whenever a panic attack strikes, it can feel “like you’re dying,” she explains. “It feels like the world is [made of] walls and they're all closing in on you and strangling you from the inside. When that begins to happen, your heart rate rises.” Knowing firsthand how debilitating mental illness is is precisely why she’s an ardent advocate of people speaking openly and honestly about their mental health and seeking help without shame. “When you have a complicated relationship with your mind...all of the tricky things, navigating [it] does not mean that you are broken and that something is broken about you or something is wrong about you. But something is very wrong with society.”

Her latest gig as Patty on Insatiable marks a new era of her career — one that is far more sinister than what fans have come to know Debby for. The drama follows a former overweight pariah who, after having her mouth wired shut because of a freak accident, loses 70 pounds, turns into a stereotypical bombshell, adopts beauty queen aspirations, and goes on a quest for revenge on those who’ve scorned her.

Debby admits she initially scoffed at the idea. “I swore off TV. I was like, ‘I'm only going to do movies,’” she says. But after going on a number of disappointing auditions for films with one-dimensional characters, and hearing how much peers in the industry liked the Insatiable script, she decided to give it a chance. While auditioning for the role, she and show creator Lauren Gussis forged an emotional connection while discussing how they wanted Patty to be represented.

“I was like, I just wanna be really clear that I've never seen rage and disordered eating and this want for justice that's so misguided. I think that it can be done in a really cool way, [or] it can just be a farce and blatantly mocked and move us so far backward. And I did not do so much work for myself to then get to a place of regressing the conversation,” Debby says. Lauren agreed that she, too, was protective of Patty’s story — seeing as it’s based on her own struggles growing up as a teen with binge-eating.

“So many of the messages I believed as a kid growing up were, if you fix your outside, suddenly you’re a good person,” Lauren told Vanity Fair. “If I only looked this way, or did this thing, I would be a popular 17-year-old girl. But the more attention I put on dieting or exercise, the less attention I put on my inside. Then I got angrier and angrier and I didn’t understand why.” Lauren hoped that the show would make fun of the trope of the “makeover montage,” wherein a perfectly average looking person (who we are supposed to believe is the “ugly duckling”) undergoes a transformation into a beautiful swan. After all, the in-joke in Princess Diaries is that Anne Hathaway didn’t need the makeover — she was a princess all along.

“For better or worse, I don't know if I've ever seen what other people see. I don't know if everyone sees differently."

Yet whatever the aims and intentions, critics have been vocal about the ways they believe the show didn’t meet the bar for effective satire, especially in light of the sensitivity of the topic and the rampant rate at which young people suffer from eating disorders. When the trailer was first released, it drew immediate criticism online, particularly on social media, with people accusing it of spreading a toxic message that one’s value lies in their physical appearance, and that you have to be thin in order to receive compassion and love from others. Before its release, a Change.org petition (with over 200,000 signatures and counting) called for Netflix to nix it altogether.

When asked about the criticism, Debby said it surprised her. “We knew that this conversation needed to be had. We knew that this societal brokenness needed to be addressed, but we didn't know how badly it needed to be addressed,” she says. But she understands the criticism, as well. “My friend, a few days before the trailer hit, in reference to something else, said, ‘The size of the reaction is the size of the wound,’ and it stayed with me.”

Since the premiere of Insatiable, reviews have been mixed — with the alleged fat-shaming being just one area of fan concern. At NPR, Linda Holmes took to task the show’s “other tropes and types best avoided: an awkward and unsexy Asian-American boy, a magical sassy godmother who is fat and black and a lesbian who exists only to educate thin white girls on how to live their best lives, and so forth.”

What’s more, Holmes posits that “Maybe the intent is to say Patty always deserved love, but there is no way — none — around the fact that if what you want to demonstrate in a story is that someone deserves love in a particular state of being, you must show them being loved in that state.”

We never see Patty being loved or accepted as a fat person, ostensibly because that’s not where her story is meant to begin. But we do catch glimpses of that Patty in pre-accident flashbacks; the visual of Debby in a “fat suit” for these scenes has been a sticking point for many. The actor admits she was skeptical of wearing the suit (which is actually not one suit but several different pieces that are applied on different parts of the body). It was a creative decision, she says, that concerned her for fear “it would almost be done in parody like in Friends.”

“There was a point where Lauren and I are like, If at any point this is funny, if at any point people laugh, we're not doing it. We're not doing the show that we're trying to do. We're just trying to portray an origin story. We're trying to showcase that,” she explains.

But wearing it was informative for Debby — though her lesson would come as no surprise for plus-size people who know firsthand how cruel people can be toward larger bodies. At one point, Debby says being the target of staring, pointing, and disrespectful comments (while in character in the suit) from extras on set disturbed her. “I was enraged and I learned what a slight percentage of Patty's rage would feel like in that situation, to be like, ‘How dare you?’” Debby says. “To be able to experience that was super educational and really eye-opening.” Yet a fat suit is still a removable wardrobe piece; it’s not as simple — or in some cases, even possible — for fat people to change their bodies at will to avoid stigma and abuse.

Despite all the criticism, perhaps one takeaway from the show is that even when she acquired the svelte body she’d always dreamed of, deep down, Patty is still really miserable. In a handful of scenes, the character can be seen breaking down in tears, distraught over the state of her life and who she’s become. Having her jaw wired shut didn’t absolve her of disordered eating, nor did it fix her self-image. Debby herself has dealt with body dysmorphia. “For better or worse, I don't know if I've ever seen what other people see. I don't know if everyone sees differently,” she says.

Over the years, she’s learned to cope with her body dysmorphia and her anxiety by going to frequent therapy sessions, crying when needed, taking proper medication, practicing breath control, and being active. “Doing something like intentional breathing, proactively, and counting six in, eight out — they're literal, tiny tricks and tips that [have] helped me,” she says.

As for the future, Debby Ryan hopes to play more multifaceted characters. “I like strong girls, obviously. I like girls with a little bit of fire in them, just because I have a fire in me and I'm not a good enough actor to pretend that I don't. I want to see and play a girl that is a lot of things at one time. Some of those things being conflicting things, some of those things [can be] opposite things, and both [can be] true.”

But trying to be a complex woman in the hypercritical world of Hollywood can be difficult. “Anything that you say and do [while] trying to find yourself as a young girl can be taken out of context and used against you,” she says. At first, it was worrisome having strangers judging her every move, but she quickly learned that at the end of the day, all that truly matters is what you think of yourself. As she puts it, “You can't find your value and your identity in other people's perception of you.”

It’s a lesson she learned early on from one of the Sprouse twins (she thinks it was Cole). “[They] said to me, ‘Listen, Debby, there are going to be people that love you and there are going be people that hate you. No matter what, at every point, don't listen to either of them.’ And I was like, Oh. That was a fun plot twist. Cool. You're right.”

On Debby Ryan in lead image:

• Zimmermann Tempest Dress, $2,650. Us.zimmermannwear.com. L. Erickson Italian Bandeau, $16. Franceluxe.com. Unravel Leather Thigh High Boots, $2,031. Barneys.com.

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