She’s still seething over those plastic surgery rumors, but Ashley Judd was all smiles Tuesday.
The actress, 43, whose noticeably fuller face ignited a media frenzy last month, stepped out to promote her new show, Missing, in Beverly Hills.
Clad in a summery bird-print dress and gold sandals, she grinned for the cameras alongside costar Nick Eversman (who plays her son on the ABC drama) and her real-life husband, race car driver Dario Franchitti.
Although her rep already shot down speculation that the star’s puffy features were the result of a cosmetic procedure, explaining that Judd is taking medication for a serious sinus infection, Judd wrote a lengthy diatribe Monday on the Daily Beast decrying the chatter about her appearance.
“The conversation [about my face] was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day,” Judd writes, adding that the debate is “really about” what she calls “the assault on [women’s] body image.”
The daughter of singer Naomi Judd and the sister of Wynonna blames “the patriarchy” for perpetuating “this abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies. . . [We] have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly.”
PHOTOS: Hollywood feuds
By making her opinions known, the Kentucky native (who earned a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2010) says she hopes she “can generate a new conversation.”
