Brooke Shields Tearily Recalls Watching Herself as a ‘Little Girl’ in New Documentary

Shields attended the premiere with her 16-year-old daughter, Grier, as well as her husband, Chris Henchy. Speaking of her daughters’ reactions to the film, the actor told Barry that although her 19-year-old, Rowan, was better able to handle the content, Grier “did not feel prepared for what she saw. And what she saw made her very, very sad.

“There were a lot of tears,” Shields added. “She had a very strong reaction in the beginning and couldn’t finish the film, to be honest.” However, with some time and conversation, Shields says, Grier was able to process her mother’s story and come to her own conclusions about it. “To see a 16-year-old have her own opinion about something was so important to me based on the very subject of the film.” 

While Pretty Baby delves into the darker moments of Shields’s life, she has a message about victimhood that she hopes women and girls, including her daughters, take away from the documentary. 

“The victim part is a dangerous thing because just by deciding not to be the victim doesn’t mean that what happened to you wasn’t wrong,” says Shields. “And I’ve been criticized for saying that too. But the interesting thing to me is, yes, there are a lot of terrible things that happen to a lot of people all the time. And in that moment, there is a victim and there’s a perpetrator. Yes. But how you go through it and how you decide to live your life—not as a victim, as someone who survived something and acknowledges how wrong it is—that’s a very different thing. I didn’t want to be defined by those horrible moments, I didn’t want my life taken away. I didn’t want the good that there was to be totally, totally obliterated by those different incidences.”