My name is Morgan Gould and I’m an NYC-based first-time filmmaker. For the last decade plus, I’ve been working in the theater world as a playwright and director – directing world premieres by other (mostly female) voices and writing and directing my own work which centers around how feminism transitions between generations, how we learn from our mothers, and why the hell my mother hasn’t asked me about my inner life since the early 90s. I write and make things about fat women, poor women, loud women, and white trash (in other words, my family and the women who raised me). I recently began developing television and film, most recently I staffed on Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham’s Amazon adaptation of A League of Their Own.

With Gorgeous, as with a lot of my work, I wanted to explore the fat femme experience (my experience!) and create a moment in time where we could see clearly that the challenge of  being fat isn’t being fat (I promise, it isn’t). It’s other people’s belief that being fat is horrible. To be fat and content or fat and happy is completely unimaginable to most people (even fat people)  because we’ve been told we’re supposed to be miserable. I wanted to demonstrate that here – this fat character would have been totally fine enjoying a normal cultural moment, were it not for the gaze of her formerly fat mother (who is also traumatized by fat stigmatization).

I also wanted to show women having fun. Enjoying each other, laughing, engaging, teasing. I wanted to show that women are capable of tremendous joy and hilarity—despite the way we’re told to be smaller, prettier, quieter, more worthy, less ourselves.

But I also wanted to capture how love has always worked in my family – it’s full-throated and funny and free and wild and then BOOM…one dangerous moment and we all realize how fragile our relationships are, how little we know each other, how much power we have to hurt each other. And how sometimes we have to stop expecting our families to give us the love we deserve.

I hope you enjoy our film and you see some of the women you know and love inside it.

All my best,

Morgan Gould