Katherine Heigl was the Next Big Thing.
She was an Emmy-winning actress on one of TV’s biggest shows, Grey’s Anatomy, and the co-lead of Knocked Up, which went on to earn over $200 million at the box office. But then, in a widely read Vanity Fair profile, Heigl criticized the Judd Apatow comedy, which she said was “hard for me to love,” for being “a little sexist,” and her career slowly started going off the rails. She grew a reputation for being difficult — that’s a word people mean negatively when it’s attached to a woman, and admiringly for a man (“Marlon Brando was difficult… but that’s part of his genius!”) — and she’s never really recovered. Her last movie, Jenny’s Wedding, launched an Indiegogo campaign to cover post-production costs.
On today’s Howard Stern Show, Heigl said it was “dumb” of her to criticize Knocked Up, which she liked “a lot.” But she didn’t like — wait for it — herself.
“She was kind of like, she was so judgmental and kind of uptight and controlling and all these things and I really went with it while we were doing it, and a lot of it, Judd allows everyone to be very free and improvise and whatever and afterwards, I was like, ‘Why is that where I went with this? What an asshole she is!'”
“It was, again, one of those situations, it was a huge opportunity for me. I was being interviewed for Vanity Fair. Like, I was on the cover of Vanity Fair, it was a huge big deal for me. And the journalist… just said, ‘You know a lot of women felt it was a little sexist’ so then I felt obligated to answer that and so I tried in my very sort of ungracious way to answer why I felt that it maybe was a little.” (Via)
Let’s revisit the Vanity Fair comments in question. Knocked Up “paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight,” Heigl said, “and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women?”
I mean, she has a point? Women don’t exactly come across very well in Knocked Up. Both Heigl and Leslie Mann’s characters are, for lack of a better word, “nags,” while Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd dick around and take drugs in Las Vegas. But maybe that was Apatow’s point? He was “exaggerating stereotypes,” or at least that’s how Heigl understands the movie now.
“I felt obligated to answer that [Vanity Fair question] and so I tried, in my very sort of ungracious way, to answer why I felt that it maybe was a little. If you read the whole quote, I’m just saying that can be the nature of broad comedy. They’re exaggerating stereotypes, that’s what makes it funny. But they just took the sexist thing out.” (Via)
When Apatow was on Stern’s show in 2009, he said that he read Heigl’s comments and thought, “Oh, well that’s, uh, I don’t know what to make of that. And then you’re like, ‘Well, at some point, I’m gonna get a call like, ‘Sorry, I was tired,’ and then the call just never comes.” Heigl still hasn’t made that call, because she’s “embarrassed” and doesn’t want “it to feel insincere on any level.” But she promised Stern that she’d get in touch with Apatow and Rogen by the end of the week to clear the air.
For the record, Heigl still hasn’t apologized for 27 Dresses, or Zyzzyx Road, or…
(Via E! Online)
