Chunks of her book have been redacted – were they the funny bits?

Rebel Wilson’s memoir, hyped as a “tell-all”, has been reduced to a “tell most of it”. Around one page in the UK edition of Rebel Rising has been blacked out, where the actress made allegations concerning her monumental rift with Sacha Baron Cohen on the set of Grimsby (2016). In her native Australia, the unexpurgated text has been pulled from shelves altogether, after lawyers for Cohen intervened. Her book tour there has been cancelled.

The redacted lines, which have been widely reported anyway, contained claims that Cohen told Wilson to “stick your finger up my a--” while shooting one scene; Cohen has since responded that every witness on set would deny this. Wilson adds – and this is unredacted – that in retrospect, “it felt like [Cohen] had sexually harassed me”. She describes the making of Grimsby as generally a demeaning experience, in which she often felt pressured into nudity, though nothing in her contract permitted it. “The movie bombed,” she writes, “which to me was karma enough.” Wilson’s reasoning for sharing this account now, in a chapter titled “Sacha Baron Cohen and Other A--holes”, is that “the more women talk about things like this, hopefully the less it happens”.

It isn’t the only aspect of Wilson’s life story that invites sympathy. She has come a long way from what she calls a “bogan” upbringing – Australian slang’s answer to “chav” – then feeling constantly unpopular through her teens and twenties. Her parents were dog handlers in Sydney, who grubbed around on the canine carnival circuit; they feuded constantly, and didn’t support her acting until she became famous. Even after that point, the Australian press were determined to drag her down. She successfully sued Bauer Media in 2015 for dubbing her a “serial liar”, though the payout was drastically reduced on appeal.

Wilson’s years of trying to get noticed involved so many rejections that she fell into bad eating habits, which in turn created a complex that her size was the reason people found her funny. She couldn’t even modify her diet while shooting Pitch Perfect (2012), because the name of her star-making character was literally “Fat Amy”.

Rebel Rising has a frankness that’s sometimes not to its benefit. Wilson includes old diary entries about her fluctuating weight and her determination to “make her own destiny”: these read like Bridget Jones if Helen Fielding had lost her touch. Still, there’s a bravery to flapping them around in public, which goes hand-in-hand with Wilson’s look-no-filter persona.

She tells a story about being invited in 2015 by a minor member of the Royal family to a tech billionaire’s birthday party in California, where drugs were on offer and she was told an orgy would soon begin. But Wilson fled before seeing anything, and a check of the historical line-of-succession will leave you none the wiser as to whether this mystery man was legitimate.

The bigger trouble with Rebel Rising is Wilson’s assertion that she’s not only a hilarious performer, which can be true on a good day, but a gifted writer of comedy, a claim this book does little to substantiate. Pride in her own achievements is swollen. She claims that audiences loved Bridesmaids (2011) “especially” for her brief role; Melissa McCarthy might raise an eyebrow, or a fist. Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), which second-billed Wilson, is hailed as “the most successful ‘musical comedy’ film of all time”, which, as she realises, needs a parenthesis explaining that this only means comedies containing musical performances, not actual musicals.

“Adele hates me,” she announces on page three – something to do with them being mistaken for one another and Wilson occasionally playing along – the only proof of which is that Adele seems “bitchy” at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Wilson fantasises about winning an Oscar herself one day, but the closest she has come so far was presenting one on stage with James Corden, in a badly received 2020 Cats skit. (She “quite liked” Cats.)

After a long-awaited health transformation helped her shed a third of her weight, Wilson finally started looking for love a few years ago. She admits that she didn’t lose her virginity until she was 35, tentatively dating men before and after. Then, out of nowhere, came her first same-sex crush. “Is my Year of Love about to have a mega plot twist?” she says of 2019.

And since kissing Charlotte Gainsbourg on screen – they played lovers in a 2022 indie no one saw – Wilson has been busy. She came out on social media to pre-empt being outed in the papers; she settled down with fashion designer Ramona Agruma; she had a daughter via surrogacy; and she wrote this memoir, which ends by reminding us that “the cream always rises to the top”. The haste to milk her first act is all the more puzzling.

Rebel Rising is published by HarperCollins at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Book