The January issue of Vanity Fair has inspired a Broadsheet girl crush on Katherine Heigl. It started way back with the infamous locker room scene on "Grey's Anatomy," in which her character Izzie Stevens boldly checks a fellow hospital intern's attempt at shaming her for paying her way through med school by modeling lingerie; indeed, she had us at "Oh, my God, breasts! How does anybody practice medicine hauling these things around?" That scene kindled an ember of interest in Heigl (and a keenness that soon fizzled for series producer Shonda Rhimes). Then, along came this spark-stoking Vanity Fair interview.
For starters, she talks about getting over the "dance of trying to please a man, trying to guess what they want you to be." Heigl says she has learned what it is that she wants and how to ask for it: "As women, we have more of a tendency to be people-pleasers, and I know a lot of women who are not vocal about what makes them happy," she says. "I spent a lot of time not being clear about who I was and what was important to me. It's easy to be taken advantage of if you're not honest." Sing it.
But the clincher is when Heigl calls her summer blockbuster "Knocked Up" "a little sexist." She makes the same observation made by Dana Stevens in her review of the "guy-centric" movie: "It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, 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? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie."
It's pretty ballsy (or ovaries-y) of her to call out the film that earned her a passport to seven-figures territory. As Jezebel sassed, it's also a tad "disingenuous." But the milieu is Hollywood, after all -- that kind of double dealing is par for the course -- and we're loving her nerve.
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