Chloë Grace Moretz Says Attention at 12 After Breakout 'Kick-Ass' Role 'Was Really Chaotic'

Chloë Grace Moretz said "everything shifted" when her 2010 breakout film Kick-Ass opened and she found herself famous at 12 years old.

In an interview recently published by Hunger Magazine, Moretz, now 25, described that time in her life as "kind of a distant memory, in the sense that I was a kid and 90 per cent of the time no one would really bother me"

"But after Kick-Ass, the first time I experienced paparazzi, it was 10 to 15 adult guys surrounding a 12-year-old girl," Moretz told the outlet, remembering a specific interaction with photographers. "They pushed my mom and she ended up falling into traffic – she didn't get hurt, but the situation was really chaotic.

"It's an assault on all the senses, with screaming and flashes," she added. "I got into the car afterwards and I just burst into tears. I think that's my marker of before and after."

Though Moretz said she had negative experiences associated with newfound fame, she said the true impact it had on her life "hit me like a ton of bricks" during a red carpet premiere when she was 18, after she already had more than 20 acting credits to her name.

"I walked off of [the red carpet] and I felt so much self- loathing and was really confused about the experience that just went down. I was really unwell after that," Moretz told Hunger Magazine about the experience. "There was this complete jarring shift in my consciousness, I questioned who I was. What am I doing? Who am I? Why am I doing this? Like, what does this mean?"

Moretz told the outlet she struggled with her body image as the internet's circulation of photos of her holding a pizza box turned into memes comparing her body to that of an animated Family Guy character.

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"And to this day, when I see that meme, it's something very hard for me to overcome," she said, noting that when she voiced her feelings on the internet joke at the time to someone, she was told: "'Oh, shut the f--- up, it's funny.' "

Moretz said she "basically became a recluse" in reaction to the negativity she felt from paparazzi photos and red carpet appearances exacerbated by the omnipresence of social media.

"It was great because I got away from the photographers and I was able to be myself, and to have so many experiences that people didn't photograph," she told Hunger. "But at the same time it made me severely anxious when I was photographed. My heart rate would rise and I would hyperventilate."

The COVID-19 pandemic, Moretz said in the interview, offered her a chance to both take advantage of wearing masks in public to avoid unwanted attention and take on "a time of introspection" with limited working options as the entertainment industry struggled to adjust to working under pandemic conditions.

The actress also said her new "five-year goal" is to purchase farmland somewhere so she can split her time between Los Angeles and nature, which she referred to as "her love language" in speaking to Hunger. Moretz also expressed a long-term interest in working behind the camera as a filmmaker.

"To say that these past two years have been transformative is an understatement, to say the least," Moretz told Hunger. "I'm a very different girl than I was. I feel like a woman now."