Being young and beautiful in Hollywood is not an exclusive club.
You can’t swing a yoga mat over your head in this town without hitting a gorgeous young actress.
So, why did Jessica Biel turn down director Rob Cohen not once, but twice, for the role of a tough Navy pilot in the high-profile, big-budget action film “Stealth,” which opens Friday? And, more important, why did Cohen insist on this particular actress over the rest of the Jessicas, Jennifers and Rachels who inhabit this city?
Sitting in a trendy lunch cafe near her new Brentwood, Calif., home, Biel said she wasn’t trying to be troublesome or arrogant when she turned down the role.
She had just done two action movies, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Blade: Trinity,” and did not want to be deemed Hollywood’s new “action chick.”
“I want to do a love story one day and a comedy with Will Ferrell the next,” she said. “That will never happen if you keep accepting the same kind of roles over and over again.” The 23-year-old actress said she took a break from her career to wait for a different kind of role to be offered and the strategy paid off.
She not only got roles in two upcoming non-action films (director Cameron Crowe’s “Elizabethtown” with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, and “The Illusionist” with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti), but she got a lot of attention from Cohen.
“I wasn’t going to settle for anyone but Jessica in this film,” he said.
He wanted the character to appear intelligent, and the role also someone who looked like she could hike 20 miles with a 50-pound pack on her back. Cohen said he didn’t want some Hollywood “stick figure.”
“What I wanted was a real American woman, with a certain kind of heartland beauty, intelligence and integrity,” he said. “That’s Jessica in a nutshell. She’s the real deal. She’s so unlike the rest of these actresses we have in this town. I’m so sick of these breast-implanted, collagen-injected clones that we’re forced to look at for roles.”
Biel, Jamie Foxx and Josh Lucas play elite Navy test pilots who are asked to fly a top-secret mission with an experimental unmanned aircraft guided by artificial intelligence. On the mission, the unmanned craft malfunctions and sets out on a deadly mission of its own that could spark a nuclear confrontation.
As for what convinced her to do another action film, the actress said she didn’t see “Stealth” as just another action film.
“It’s not just about blowing things up,” she said. “It’s a love story. It’s a morality tale. It’s got a lot to say about the future of war.”
The 5-foot-7 Biel said she had worked out extensively for “Blade: Trinity,” and continued her six-days-a-week regimen when she began “Stealth.”
“It would have been a joke if I didn’t look like I could physically control an aircraft like that.”
Biel, who makes her second big-screen appearance in a bikini in “Stealth (the first was in 2001’s “Summer Catch,”), said she would rather be known as a talented actress and looks forward to the day when she is hired for her skills.
“This movie (‘Stealth’) is a serious film, and I don’t believe I was hired for my looks,” she said. “But even this film has a scene with me in a bikini. When I read it in the script, I didn’t like it at first, but I eventually realized that it fits into the context of the story. Of course, I didn’t expect them to be selling the movie using my butt in a bikini. But that’s how Hollywood works.”
With a smile and a slight shrug of resignation, she added, “If I don’t want to do it, I’m sure there are plenty of girls who will.”
———-
Edited by MaeganCarberry (mcarberry@tribune.com) and Ben Delery (bdelery@tribune.com)
