I did not expect to find myself in the position of sticking up for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
I thought, after seeing “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” that she would charm people in the role. She is, no question at all, a professional model, and she carries herself in every second of that film like she knows that Michael Bay is shooting everyone in the movie (and her in particular) like cars in a car commercial, and she doesn’t have a problem with that.
But she has more than that going on. She’s not just Hot POA #2 for the franchise. At least, not in my opinion. I think what she does well in the film is create a sense that she knows what effect she has on men in general, and she chooses loyalty to one person in particular and means it. She makes you believe that the unlikeliest relationship of the summer actually means something. She’s invested completely, and she plays Carly as sweet, not as a man-eater.
We talk about the specific physical challenges that she faced in shooting the Chicago sequences. The office building sequence is one of the great physical builds of recent memory, a crazy gimbal set that punishes the actors back and forth at increasingly mental angles, and she ends up playing the whole thing in giant high heels because, after all, this is a Michael Bay film.
I think she’s taking some really mean-spirited abuse from critics right now, and I hope filmmakers watch this one with more open minds. I have a feeling she’s capable of more than we see here, and I’d like to see someone give her that next role to play. One thing’s for sure… being a model is no short cut to being treated like an actress by the public or by critics. I will go on the record saying I think she’s better than given credit for, and when we spoke, I think my feelings about her work were clearly communicated.
“Transformers: Dark of The Moon” is in theaters and IMAX right now.