James Corden has said that “chubby” actors are routinely excluded from the casting for romantic roles because of an industry aversion to showing them falling in love or having sex. The Late Late Show host, 40, said that “fat” actors have to accept in film or on TV that “certainly no one ever finds you attractive”.

Speaking to the actor David Tennant on his podcast, David Tennant Does a Podcast With, Corden said that overweight people are, at best, cast as the funny friend of someone who is “attractive”. He said that such characters “never really fall in love” and “never have sex”.

Speaking of his breakthrough while he was performing in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in 2004, Corden said: “I was in the play with seven other boys who were at a similar age and a similar place in our careers, and pretty much every day, three or four of these boys would come in with a massive film script under their arm.”

For one role, “they were looking for two boys of 21 and 22 and [two others] got sent the script [for lead roles] and I got sent just two pages to play a newsagent at the start of this film,” he said. “I really felt like people were going, ‘We think you’re quite good. It’s just because of what you look like.’”

Corden said that larger actors are often typecast. “You will be good friends with people who are attractive and will perhaps chip in with the odd joke every now and again,” he said. “As you get older, you’ll probably be a judge in something or you’ll be dropping off a television to a handsome person in a sitcom.”

Corden’s beliefs are echoed by studies on the topic. American research has shown that the under-representation of overweight people on prime-time television has fuelled discriminatory attitudes in the general public. In terms of gender, this bias affects women more than men, and wider studies have found that media narratives on obesity continue to fuel the inequality.

Establishing his career in the early 2000s sitcom Fat Friends, Corden has previously spoken of weight discrimination in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone. “I could never understand, when I watch romantic comedies,” he said, “the notion that for some reason unattractive or heavy people don’t fall in love. If they do, it’s in some odd, kooky, roundabout way – and it’s not.”