Katerina Papoutsaki Warns Against Cruel Body Comments After ‘Deformed’ Remark

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Katerina Papoutsaki says years of public criticism have made her largely immune to hostile comments about her appearance. One recent remark, however, made the Greek actress consider what the same words could do to someone already struggling with their relationship with food and their body.

Speaking to television reporters at the presentation of Athena Oikonomakou’s first book on Wednesday, 23 September, Papoutsaki recalled a comment left beneath one of her photographs describing her as “deformed”, “fat from the waist down” and “very thin on top”.

Her first reaction was disbelief.

“I went crazy and thought, imagine someone who is suffering and flirting with anorexia nervosa. What would happen to them?” she said. “People need to be careful.”

Papoutsaki said she did not respond to the person who wrote it. “I laughed.”

The actress, now 47, has had almost three decades in Greek television, film and theatre, but the particular strain of public scrutiny she describes can be traced to one role.

In 2008, Papoutsaki was cast as Aliki Vougiouklaki in Eho Ena Mystiko (I Have a Secret), the television drama based on the biography written by Vougiouklaki’s son, Giannis Papamichael. The casting became a subject of intense discussion before the series had even aired, with the production and Papoutsaki’s interpretation of one of Greece’s most famous actresses attracting unusually close attention. Contemporary coverage in To Vima recorded the debate surrounding the series months before its premiere.

Papoutsaki has spoken with unusual consistency about what that period was like from inside it.

Earlier this year, reflecting on the role in an interview with OK!, she pointed out that she had already been working professionally for eight years by the time she played Vougiouklaki. She had appeared in theatre and television, including Kokkinos Kyklos, Aerines Siopes and I Apli Methodos ton Trion. Yet the reaction to Eho Ena Mystiko, she said, was so consuming that it seemed to eclipse what had come before. She has also described experiencing severe stress and psychosomatic symptoms during the production.

When reporters asked her this week how she now deals with negative comments, she returned immediately to that period.

“There were a lot of hate comments, especially during that time with Aliki,” she said. “The bad comments were very intense, so after that I became immune. Now I laugh.”

The comment is telling not because Papoutsaki claims criticism no longer reaches her, but because she has spoken openly in the past about how much it once did. In a 2024 interview, she said the criticism surrounding the Vougiouklaki role had been difficult precisely because she had not previously encountered that level of hostility.

Nearly 18 years later, the mechanism has changed. Criticism that once arrived through reviews, television panels and magazine commentary now appears instantly beneath an Instagram photograph, often written by people the subject has never met.

Papoutsaki remains a familiar presence on Greek television. This year she returned to the judging panel of ANT1’s Your Face Sounds Familiar, alongside Giorgos Theofanous, Renos Haralambidis and Rena Morfi. The revived series premiered in April and completed its season in July.

Asked whether another cycle was coming, Papoutsaki said that, as far as she knew, the programme would now take a break.

“We’ll let it rest for a while and then start again from the beginning,” she said.

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