Smoke siren

Opinionated actor Katherine Heigl is like a puff of fresh air in Hollywood

She enters the room in a knit that fits. Lipstick the colour of a valentine. The doors to the balcony are thrown open and she exhales, “Great, I can smoke,” and pulls one from the pack. She was raised Mormon, but she’s drinking coffee by the gallon, and for the next hour Katherine Heigl is happy to talk about anything.

Heigl, 29, might be the new It Girl. She was just on the cover of Vanity Fair. She stars in 27 Dresses, about a plainish Jane who is forever the bridesmaid, never the bride. It’s Heigl’s first traditional romantic comedy. Heigl is also Dr Isobel ‘Izzie’ Stevens on the top-rated TV show Grey’s Anatomy, a role that won Heigl an Emmy.

Heigl has been in the business a long time. A child model, then child actor, then teen actor. She did many mediocre TV movies. After graduating from a Connecticut high school, Heigl and her mom drove west. She laughs. “L.A. is a totally different universe.” It stereotypes you. “You’re the blonde. Or the cheerleader. It would have been really easy to fall back on the blonde and the bra size and do that for the rest of my career.”

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When her film Knocked Up was released, Heigl suggested that her character, Alison Scott, was the stiff, overachieving shrew while her boyfriend was all fun. Heigl suggested it was a little sexist, maybe, that the guys get all the jokes, and the gals are always the buzz kill. There “were a lot of moments where I screwed up takes because I was laughing so much. But I couldn’t play the girl who thought it was funny. I had to play the girl who was telling (the guys) to grow up!”

Do they treat Heigl like a Mormon? “If I were a still super-practicing strict Mormon, then people would be a little more cautious around me, but unfortunately I’m fairly vulgar, and I smoke and I drink coffee and I drink alcohol and I love to talk about religion.”

Heigl turns to her assigned subject: weddings. Which reminds her of when she lost a role in Wedding Crashers and thought her career had stalled. “I was just about to call it quits,” she says. Instead she got hired for Grey’s Anatomy.

Now she’s talking about her new comedy, 27 Dresses, and the question of why her character, Jane, is such a doormat. “Jane wants to be the victim. It’s much safer than to actually go after what she wants and fail,” she says.

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“It’s the kind of movie I try to go see every chance I can get. But, she says, and you’ve got to like this part, “there’s not a ton of profoundness about it.”
-William Booth (LAT-WP)