Kathy Bates is unrecognizable from her Misery days in her latest appearance on the Matlock press tour.
The iconic actress arrived at the CBS Mornings studio on Tuesday to discuss the upcoming second season of the detective show, but all anyone could talk about was her incredible transformation.
Kathy wore eye-catching green cat-eye glasses, a green sweater and a shiny puffer vest on top as she greeted fans outside the studio.
This year, she made headlines for her dramatic weight loss, revealing that she had lost over 100 pounds during her health journey.
During her morning show appearance, the 76-year-old explained how her life has improved dramatically since her weight loss.
“I feel like a different woman, I really do,” she began. “I look in the mirror and go ‘Oh, my gosh‘. I went into my costume fittings and I’m wearing a size ten, and it’s so different from being a 3X and being able to walk and move and pick things off the rack.”
She feels better about herself and is more present at work on Matlock now that she regularly exercises and eats a healthy diet.
“Health-wise, the show is hard, and it takes a lot of stamina, and I feel up to it every day,” she said.
“How these two things coincided in my life; being really healthy and then suddenly being given this gift [to star in Matlock], every day feels like a miracle.”
The Fried Green Tomatoes star opened up about how she achieved her new look in a recent interview with People, revealing that she lost 80 pounds thanks to a lifestyle and diet change, and the final 20 fell off after she began taking the weight-loss drug Ozempic.
“There’s been a lot of talk that I just was able to do this because of Ozempic,” she said.
“But I have to impress upon people out there that this was hard work for me, especially during the pandemic. It’s very hard to say you’ve had enough.”
Kathy continued: “I ate because I was afraid, and I ate because it was a FU to my self-esteem. [Diabetes] runs in my family, and I’d seen what my father had gone through. He had had a leg amputation. One of my sisters is dealing with it very seriously, and it terrified me. It scared me straight.”
After her own Type 2 diabetes diagnosis, she stopped eating fast food and learned to recognize when she was full.
She explained that she didn’t want a trainer as she wanted to motivate herself to be healthy rather than have “anybody over my shoulder”.
“It’s just very important to me to keep this going. I don’t want to slip,” she said.
The second season of Matlock premiered in late September on CBS and follows Kathy’s character, Madeline Matlock, who works at a law firm and uses her wiles to win tricky cases.