Christine Taylor Was ‘Embarrassed’ After ‘Brady Bunch’ Producers Asked Her to Lose 10 Pounds

Christine Taylor has nothing but love for her Brady Bunch movie era — but revisiting one specific memory left her feeling uneasy all over again.

Taylor, 54, opened up about landing the role of Marcia Brady in 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie during the Wednesday, September 2 episode of the Office Ladies podcast, hosted by Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey.

Taylor explained she grew up obsessed with the original Brady Bunch, which premiered in 1969 with Maureen McCormick playing Marcia.

“The Brady Bunch was my after-school treat,” she said on the podcast, noting “every single episode, I’ve seen backwards and forwards, inside out.”

She was already playing Marcia in a stage production called The Real Live Brady Bunch when she got a surprise call from Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz, who invited her to his home to discuss the film.

“It was a pinch-me moment that I cannot believe to this day that I still didn’t keep my little tape from the answering machine,” she said.

After booking the role, Taylor told Fischer, 52, and Kinsey, 55, that she brought her superfan knowledge to the performance, wanting it to be “so genuine and so pure and so Maureen.”

But Taylor’s enthusiasm was tempered by one request from producers.

“The one thing that I got, and I was not a super heavy person, but they asked me to lose 10 pounds,” Taylor told the hosts. “They wanted me to lose 10 pounds, but it didn’t matter. I was like, ‘I’ll lose 10 pounds,'” she said. “Of course, I was embarrassed when that ask came my way, because by the way, it would never happen today.”

While on Office Ladies, Taylor added, “I wasn’t the only person ever being asked to lose weight for a role back then. That was just how things went.”

She also revealed that if fans watch closely, her weight fluctuates on screen — something she jokingly blamed in part on her fondness for nonfat frozen yogurt at the time.

“I’ll come into a scene looking a little rounder, and then I exit the scene looking a little thinner, just because of how they had to reshoot things,” she said.

Away from the Brady Bunch spotlight, Taylor has weathered her own real-life ups and downs with husband Ben Stiller. The couple, who married in 2000 and share two children — Ella, 24, and Quinlin, 21 — separated in 2017 before quietly reconciling around 2022.

“I met Ben when I was 28 years old … Kids always have growth spurts and you have different chapters and stages in your life, and I feel that’s also true for adults and particularly women,” she said on The McBride Rewind podcast in June. “You get married, become a mom, for those who become mothers … career, put your career on hold, all those different chapters, and I think at that moment in time for us, we were just not on the same page with a lot of things.”