Kate Beckinsale has clapped back at her critics in quite the unrecognizable fashion.
The actress took to Instagram on Wednesday with a series of photos and videos of herself, though fans may not have recognized her at first. Instead of her typically glamorous red carpet appearance, Beckinsale shared snaps of herself transformed into an old man dressed to get married. The images and footage, which appear to be from her 2023 Halloween costume, show the star wearing a mask and a white suit while sitting in a wheelchair with fake testicles hanging from her pant leg. Paired with someone dressed as a bride, the two evoked Anna Nicole Smith at her wedding to 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall in 1994.
However, the posts were not for the purposes of an Instagram throwback. Instead, the Click actress took aim at her naysayers, writing, “New deal. This is all you’re getting. Hope it is less triggering and more what you consider age appropriate. Sayonara b**ches.”
Her retort comes mere days after she issued a since-deleted message about the impact social media trolls commenting about her appearance has had on her.
“I hate talking about this because I hate adding to this conversation but I’m doing it because insidious bullying of any kind over time takes a toll,” Beckinsale, who recently made her first red carpet appearance after being hospitalized, wrote.
Continued Beckinsale, “These videos might be 20 years apart -maybe more. Every time I post anything – and by the way, this has been the case since I was about 30 -I am accused of having had unrecognisable surgery /using Botox using fillers /being obsessed with looking younger, and it’s really such a tiresome and subtly vicious way to bully a person.”
“I don’t actually do any of those things -I’ve even gone to the trouble of having a plastic surgeon categorically state that I don’t and haven’t,” Beckinsale continued in the caption, “and still, every time there’s a chorus of my God, you’re unrecognisable… it happens constantly and it’s usually women that are doing it.”
In addition to explaining the natural changes to her appearance over decades, the 50-year-old — whose stepfather, Roy Battersby, died in January — also addressed the “irony” of people thinking she cannot handle aging.
“Life happens -obviously I have aged, everybody ages; I’m not too concerned about aging-because I found my father dead at the age of 5 ,I spent most of my teenage years and a good deal of my 20s absolutely crippled with severe anxiety and panic attacks that I was going to die of a heart attack too, and went to emergency rooms often, and was almost, at that time of my life, completely immobilised by that anxiety,” she explained. “The fact that one of the major things I am bullied about is an assumption that I can’t handle the idea of getting older is so deeply ironic when my all consuming terror was that I never thought I’d even see the end of my 20s.”
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