Rebecca Gibney "okay" with weight gain for 'Mental' movie role

Rebecca Gibney has gained 15kg for a new movie role.

The 46-year-old Australian actress, who is best known as Julie in TV drama Packed to the Rafters, said that she was "okay" with gaining a lot of weight to play a depressed mother-of-five sectioned to a psychiatric ward in PJ Hogan film Mental.

Gibney has revealed that she ate copious amounts of peanut butter, cottage pie, ice cream, burgers, fries and doughnuts in order to pile on the weight.

The Logie award-winning star told the Herald Sun: "This film is going to be liberating because it's the first time I'm allowing the rest of the world to see me in my most vulnerable state. I'm not going to be made-up or glamorous. I'm going to be fat, and that's okay.

"People are bandying around words such as 'brave', but I've had people coming up to me for years saying, 'You look prettier in photographs; you're quite ordinary'. They're right - and now everyone will see that. I have four weeks between finishing the film and shooting Rafters again, so I'll be in boot camp trying to lose it."

Mental, which also stars Toni Collette, Anthony LaPaglia, Liev Schreiber and Deborah Mailman, is currently in its seventh week of filming.

Gibney has previously admitted that she sometimes suffers from body image issues, saying: "When I despair about my stomach, my husband reminds me that it carried our incredibly beautiful son. I still look in the mirror and wonder where that extra roll, the cellulite and wrinkles came from."

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