‘Everwood’ actress Sarah Drew says reading negative online comments calling her ‘ugly’ was ‘so damaging’

Sarah Drew’s fame predates the rise of social media, but she can remember trolls even in the pre-Instagram days.

“Everwood was my first show ever, and I got addicted, there was no social media yet, but there were forums and message boards. And I was addicted to reading message boards,” she said on a recent episode of Rachel Bilson and Olivia Allen’s Broad Ideas podcast. “It’s the worst thing ever. It was so bad for me. Because my character, I came on to play the ugly wallflower best friend of Emily VanCamp. I had glasses and frizzy hair and not a stitch of makeup. I was the ugly one, the ugly duckling.”

Drew says that she’s “sure there were lots of lovely things people said about my performance,” but the comments she still remembers “word for word” were the negatives ones, like “‘Sarah Drew is so ugly that the television cracks every time she steps in front of it’… it hurt so badly.”

Drew’s first main role was a voice role, as Stacy in the MTV animated series Daria. She landed that part when she was only 17, but was still only 24 when she was cast on Greg Berlanti’s small town drama Everwood. The series properly launched Drew’s acting career, putting her in contention for plum roles like that of Dr. April Kepner on Grey’s Anatomy, which she’s now best known for.

But the sudden thrust into the spotlight was jarring, especially considering Drew’s background. “I grew up never considering whether I was pretty or not. It just wasn’t a thing we talked about,” she told Bilson and Allen. “My mom is a scientist and, just, makeup wasn’t worn. Hair, nobody cared about it, nobody cared about fashion.”

Drew says she was “so driven as I was an overachiever in terms of getting good grades and I wanted to please everybody, everywhere, and also in terms of acting, I was like absolutely fully focused on, ‘I’m going to be an actor in my life, and I’m going to find any opportunity I can, and I’m going to shine in any possible way that I can,'” that she “never considered whether I was one of the pretty people in the world or not.”

Suddenly “absorbing all of these comments, so many nasty things about how ugly I was. All of a sudden I was like, ‘Am I an ugly person? I guess maybe I’m an ugly person.'”

Drew found the experience to be “so damaging,” prompting her now, 20 years later, to “think about our girls.” The actress has two daughters with the academic Peter Lanfer, and she worries for them now that social media is far more widespread, practically to the point of inescapability.

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“We are not built for this feedback. Social media? Our nervous systems are not built to take in all of this feedback,” she theorized.

Drew starred on Grey‘s across eleven seasons, finally hanging up her scrubs in 2022. Since then she’s forayed into writing and producing, helping usher the Lifetime movies Reindeer Games Homecoming and How She Caught a Killer into the world and most recently appearing in the Hallmark series Mistletoe Murders.