Rebel Wilson wants to remind everyone that there isn’t one path for your journey. The self-professed "late bloomer" is using her upcoming memoir, Rebel Rising, to share that she didn’t lose her virginity until she was 35. She already knows that people might be shocked to hear her revelation, and that's exactly why she wanted to share it. She realized that by sharing her story, she is empowering people to accept their own late bloomer status. Rebel also talked about the pressure she felt to lie about how old she was the first time she had sex because of a fear of people making fun of her. Now she’s owning her truth.
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She is trying to empower others.
Rebel, 44, shared that the reason she’s telling people now is to send a "positive message" and remind people that "not everybody has to lose their virginity as a teenager."
"People can wait till they're ready or wait till they're a bit more mature," Rebel told People. "And I think that could be a positive message. You obviously don't have to wait until you're in your thirties like me, but you shouldn't feel pressure as a young person."
She felt it was better to keep the truth a secret.
The actress shared that she was "embarrassed" to talk about sex as a teenager and that she would purposely avoid the topic.
"There was one vague time, I think I told my best friend, 'Oh, yeah, I just did it to just get it over with when I was like 23,'" she said. "Just to really avoid the questions."
Rebel acknowledged that it was hard for her to speak up.
"Normally I would just leave the room when the conversation was happening," she admitted. "And then the people that said, 'Oh, at 24, it's so late.' And then I'm sitting here thinking, 'Oh my God, my number's 35. What the hell? I'm going to look like the biggest loser.'"
It certainly began to affect her self-esteem.
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She wishes that she was born later.
Rebel also shared her belief that her feelings about sex and her sexuality would have been significantly different if she had been born later. "It's absolutely incredible, if I had been born 20 years later, I probably would've explored my sexuality more. I just knew I was attracted to men, and that was the normal thing," she said.
She's found her happily ever after.
In 2022, Rebel announced on social media that she was in a relationship with designer Ramona Agruma. The couple got engaged at Disneyland in 2023 and are raising Rebel’s daughter, Royce, together. She credits her father’s death for allowing her to be open to the idea of marriage.
"And then only years later, meeting women and having feelings for a woman, and that, I just think it's a sign of where society kind of was," she said.
