Mandy Moore recalls ‘mortifying’ comment Justin Timberlake made about her feet

Mandy Moore has opened up about an embarrassing interaction she had with Justin Timberlake early in their careers.

In a Q&A with Bustle published on 4 January, the This Is Us star opened up about her rise to fame as a teenager with her 1999 breakout hit, “Candy”. While Moore has since had a successful career in music, film and television, she told Bustle that she struggles with anxiety more as an adult than she did as a teenager.

“I didn’t know enough to be as nervous as I probably should have been, like you’re stepping into an adult world, you’re on the precipice of life changing forever as you know it and any sort of autonomy is going by the wayside,” she said about her early career. “I am really grateful looking back that nobody took me outside of my comfort zone. I was always just allowed to be myself.”

However, there was one moment that occurred while she was on tour with NSYNC that had her second-guessing herself. The A Walk to Remember actor explained that although she was touring with the boy band at the time, she was still “besotted” with the group. She even recalled being backstage with Timberlake and NSYNC when they began comparing height and foot size.

At one point, Timberlake looked at Moore’s feet and said: “Wow, you have big feet for a girl.” Moore explained that her height was around 5’10” and she had size 10 feet at the time, describing herself as “this long, skinny thing with these long boat feet”.

“It didn’t scar me, but I was like, ‘Oh, that was not the thing that you wanted this really handsome, famous guy to notice about you,’” she said about Timberlake’s comment. Years later, Timberlake found Moore and apologised for the awkward interaction, which Moore thought was “wholly unnecessary, but entirely gracious and sweet of him”.

“He’s like, ‘I know how that could traumatise you.’ I was like, ‘Justin, no, no, no, I’m fine,’” she recounted. “It was very, very kind of him. That was a mortifying moment. But you know, that kind of stuff, it’s good for you.”

Although Moore later transitioned her career from singing into acting, starring in 2001’s The Princess Diaries and voicing Rapunzel in the animated Disney film Tangled, the 39-year-old released her first album in 10 years, Silver Landings, in 2020. Moore was previously married to musician Ryan Adams in 2009, finalising their divorce in 2016. She got engaged to her now-husband Taylor Goldsmith in 2017 and they were married in an intimate backyard ceremony in 2018. The couple share two children: sons Gus, two, and Ozzie, one.

Much like Moore, pop star Britney Spears also rose to fame during the late 1990s and mingled with boy band members. The “Toxic” singer’s bestselling memoir, The Woman in Me, divulged many details about her relationship with Timberlake, which ran from 1999 to 2002.

In her memoir, which was released in October 2023, Spears revealed that she had an abortion while dating Timberlake. The pair officially broke up in 2002, with The Social Network actor calling it quits with Spears over text. She wrote that the breakup left her “devastated” and she had even considered leaving the music industry entirely during that time. However, it seemed to Spears that the separation didn’t phase Timberlake. “I was comatose in Louisiana, and he was happily running around Hollywood,” she wrote.

Shortly after Timberlake released his hit single, “Cry Me a River”, the music video for the song featured a woman with blonde hair, sparking rumours that he and Spears broke up because she allegedly cheated on him. However, Timberlake opted not to address cheating speculation in 2002, revealing during an interview with Barbara Walters that he and Spears agreed not to not to “say specifically why” they went their separate ways.

The following year, Spears opened up about the breakup in an interview with Diane Sawyer. When Sawyer asked her what she had done wrong in the relationship, she said: “I think everyone has a side of their story to make them feel a certain way… and I’m not technically saying he’s wrong, but I’m not technically saying he’s right either.”