Brooke Shields dishes on downsizing, trolls and embracing her 'Mother of the Bride' era

In a new series, USA TODAY’s The Essentials, celebrities share what fuels their lives.

Brooke Shields looks pretty great in an ugly mother-of-the-bride dress.

The hideous gown foisted upon her as Miranda Cosgrove's mom in the new Netflix movie "Mother of the Bride" − black, feathered, impossible to shimmy into − figures into Shields' favorite scene from the rom-com (streaming Friday), in which she hilariously pratfalls through a try-on.

"The minute a color is called something like seafoam and you're a bridesmaid, you know you're in trouble," says the "Suddenly Susan" and "Blue Lagoon" actress and model, recalling her own bridal party experiences. "And the minute someone says, 'Oh, you can wear it again,' you’re like, 'No, unless this is a perfect little black dress, I actually am never going to wear this again.' "

Casually clad in a black polo shirt and her signature aviator glasses for a Zoom call, Shields, 58, discusses her extensive jeans wardrobe, why she's struggling to downsize and distancing herself from internet trolls.

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What's on Brooke Shields' playlist?

"I'll just put on Beyonce ('Renaissance' and 'Cowboy Carter') and listen over and over again at the gym,” she says. "I'll put on Miley (Cyrus). I love to listen to the voices and stories of very strong women." Husband Chris Henchy "puts on jazz the minute he wakes up in the morning, so there's that in my house all the time."

She's also starting to share music with her daughters Rowan, 20, and Grier, 18, who went to the Eras Tour. "I do listen to Taylor Swift," Shields says. "I just like the energy."

Her most recent concert? Madonna. "I've linked a lot of my history to those songs."

Jeans are still a wardrobe staple for Brooke Shields

Famously, nothing came between Brooke Shields and her Calvins in the '80s, and her jean wardrobe remains sizable.

"Sometimes I'm in the mood for a little bit of a lower rise and a slight bell. Sometimes I would like what's really in now, which is high-waisted, button, straight leg," she says. "Then there's the cropped version that I like to wear with a kitten heel. Then there's Nili Lotan, who does this really soft, great kind of slight flare. I'm moving away a little bit from the skinny jean unless I'm wearing an over-the-knee boot and a big, big sweater.

"I have so many pairs of jeans, and I'm constantly re-looking at them, re-folding them, seeing how I can repurpose them."

Her workout routine has changed drastically since she broke her femur

In 2021, Shields tumbled off a balance board and snapped her thigh bone. She had to learn to walk again, and "I'm still not able to do a lot of things."

She took up pickleball for her new movie and has shifted to exercises that "help with rehab as well as strengthening, like Pilates. I can now spin again, so I can resume some SoulCycling. I’m getting back."

She's happier living with less but finds it difficult to purge

"I struggle with that all the time," she says. "Because now I’m in this place where I want to get rid of everything." What she has is the unique problem that "a lot of my stuff is archival."

She recently decided to ditch the contents of her bookshelves and "just situate pretty stacks of books that made sense from a decorative standpoint," but the issue is that "I'm in a lot of them. So what do you do with that?"

"It's a weird thing, because it's not that I'm not attached, it's just that it's attached to me, and there's this difference."

What she doesn't want to do is subject her children to "the monstrosity of a project that I had to go through" after her mother, Teri Shields, a diligent keeper of things, died in 2012. "There were real treasures that were hidden, but it was entrusted to me to do all of it. And it was definitely a burden and expensive."

Brooke Shields won't let trolls ruin Instagram for her

"I don't read comments" from mean fans. "It's never really about me, it's about them. You're putting it out there, so you've got to expect this, but what I don’t have to do is let it affect me. Because 99% of the time, I imagine, it's not coming from people I respect, nor did I ask for their opinion."

She's thinking more about what work looks like beyond acting

"A few years ago, I just started expanding the way I thought about my career. Between COVID and the strike, there were periods of inactivity I had in my life I'd never had before," the "Holiday Harmony" and "A Castle for Christmas" star says.

"I realized that it was important for me to reinforce other areas of creativity that I had potential access to."

That spurred an upcoming book about aging and Beginning Is Now, her online community and brand for women 40 to 60-plus. She's "pleased and proud" to be starring in a movie about finding love later in life, because "we're not told it's this beautiful period of time that can have possibility. We have a lot to offer at this age. But because our kids are leaving, there's this sense of no man's land. And I refused to feel that."

Brooke Shields wants to be president of Actors' Equity: 'My time to step up'

"I've been a member for so long and the theater community has given me so much," she says of the union that represents more than 51,000 professional actors and stage managers. "It felt like it was my time to step up, and this was my way of doing it.

"In order to make (celebrity) something you don't try to hide from or resent the lack of privacy, it has to have good (with it)," she says. "It's easy to want to become a hermit. I have to feel like I'm harnessing it and I'm not a victim to it. If I can be the voice piece, or at least the conduit, well, then there's value in being famous."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.