The Academy Awards gave birth to many a meme, but none more meta than Chrissy Teigen’s second viral awards face. The Sports Illustrated model’s expression, in response to Stacey Dash’s unexpected Oscars appearance, quickly became the most widely circulated reaction of the night. “I am not good at poker,” Teigen tweeted after the image went viral. Here, five things you probably didn’t know about Chrissy Teigen.
1. Teigen, who was discovered while working at a California surf shop when she was 18 years old, never thought she had a future in modeling. “I always wanted to be a teacher or wanted to do something with food,” she told The Daily Beast. “But modeling, I just never thought I could do it myself really ever. I still have trouble calling myself a model. I just never thought I was tall enough or skinny enough. [When I was starting] it was the time of the very thin, waif-y runway models. So I knew I couldn’t do that.”
2. Teigen may now be one of the most high-profile swimsuit models in the business, but that doesn’t mean she was always embraced fully by the industry. “I actually was fired from a job, Forever 21,” she once told DuJour. “They booked me directly when I was much younger, and [when] I showed up on set, they asked me if they could take a photo. And they shoot that photo off to my agency, who then calls me as I’m sitting in the makeup chair, and they say, ‘You need to leave right now; they just said you are fat and you need to come get your measurements taken,’” Teigen said, adding, “I hate you, Forever 21. I hate you so much. Honestly, you are the worst.”
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3. In 2006, Teigen got one of the biggest breaks of her career: starring in the hit video for the song “Stereo.” The gig is also how she met her future husband, John Legend. “I walked into John’s dressing room to meet him, and he was ironing in his underwear,” she has said. “I said, ‘You do your own ironing!?’ He said, ‘Of course I do.’ I gave him a hug.” After the shoot, Legend and Teigen reportedly ate at In-N-Out and then retired to the hotel. “I’m not going to lie. We hooked up,” she said. Their meet-cute didn’t lead to an immediate relationship, however. “I let him be himself for a while,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is try to lock someone like that down early on, then have them think, ‘There’s so much more out there.’ I played it cool for a long time. Never once did I ask, ‘What are we?’ Marriage was never my goal, because I’ve never been very traditional. I was just happy to be with him.”
4. The 30-year-old has said that she immediately knew her husband’s ballad “All of Me” was inspired by her: “The first line of it is ‘What would I do without your smart mouth,’ so if that’s not about me, I don’t know what is.” It was only fitting then that Teigen would star in Legend’s video for the song. But it turns out that the black-and-white tribute was even more symbolic: “It’s a crazy story,” Legend once said. “This friend of ours, Nabil, who is a great photographer and great director, we’ve worked with him for a long time; and he actually introduced us seven years ago when we first met, and we were shooting a video together the first time we met, and Nabil directed it,” Legend said. “And so we thought we should come full circle and shoot the video in the place we’re getting married, with the same director who introduced us years ago, and it just turned out perfectly.”
5. Despite her role as a commentator on Spike’s Lip Sync Battle, Teigen is not skilled in the art of lip-syncing. “Actually, the show has asked me a few times and I’m just terrified,” Teigen has said. “I thought I was doing it when it was a commercial break, but now I learned it’s going to be aired on the last episode and I’m terrified. There are too many things to think about. It’s lip-syncing, but there are also dancers, and then you have to dance. . . . You really have to enunciate. There’s an art to it, and I can’t do it. John doesn’t lip-sync, so he isn’t really good at it either.” This interview probably took place before Teigen’s rendition of “. . . Baby One More Time” aired.
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