Maxine Peake says she was fat-shamed and told she'd 'never play Juliet' at top London drama school

Maxine Peake has revealed that she was fat-shamed and told she would "never play Juliet" unless she lost weight while receiving her training at drama school.The Silk star went to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) aged 21, with her attempts to receive a scholarship (which were eventually successful) being documented for The South Bank Show.But in a new interview, Peake, 52, opened about the brutal comments she was subjected to at the prestigious – and notoriously tough – drama school."I've been told at RADA by a teacher, if I didn’t lay off the chips, I would never play Juliet. Those were her exact words," Peake told Anita Rani on the Sisters of Defiance podcast.Peake received a scholarship to study at the prestigious school"To which I went, 'I don’t want to play Juliet. She kills herself at 16 because of a boy.'"The Standard has contacted RADA for comment.Peake is by no means the only actor to have had a tough time while studying at the drama school in the 1990s or 2000s.This Country creator Daisy May Cooper reflected on her time at the drama school in a 2023 interview with The Standard, saying that she'd "not known bullying like what I experienced in that school, in any f***ing workplace".Peake (front left) in Victoria Wood’s dinnerladies, which she landed soon after leaving drama schoolPA"I don’t think that I realised that it was real bullying until I started talking to other people from my year, or other people that went… That [kind of] bullying does not need to exist anywhere," she said.“It’s not like, ‘We’re trying to shape you into the best people that you could be, so we’ve got to be mean.’ That’s not going to get the best out of people, that’s going to leave [them] with scars that they can never fix.”Apologising at the time, a representative for the drama school told The Standard: “We are very sorry to hear about Daisy May Cooper’s experiences at Rada when she trained here, and would not tolerate the practices she describes in our present teaching environment.“The wellbeing of our students is critical to us, and our wellbeing team works closely with students while they are exploring challenging material, and afterwards. We are also committed to a zero-tolerance policy on any discrimination, harassment or bullying.”