Katherine Heigl makes a statement with performance

“Oh, man, I’m tired,” Katherine Heigl said with a laugh. It was 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning and Heigl was wearing a full-length red Oscar De La Renta dress, black shawl over the shoulders. Her hair was blown out, face fully made up.

The week very much promised to be busy. She was getting married in a few days to singer Josh Kelley, a destination wedding on her property in Utah. She was still deflecting comments she made in Vanity Fair magazine.

And she had her first big starring role in a movie to promote, in the romantic comedy “27 Dresses,” opening today.

“I’m not a workaholic,” she insisted. “I’m not. I’m the laziest person I know.”

It was hard to believe, coming from someone in De La Renta at 9 in the morning. Still, this self-effacing confession is in keeping with Heigl’s growing reputation as being unusually frank – “outspoken,” people call her.

Jane Fonda in Vietnam was outspoken; Heigl in Hollywood, calling the character she played in “Knocked Up” a shrew, is merely being forthright.

“The press or the media has decided that I’m outspoken, and I guess that’s my angle or something,” Heigl says. “I have been this way for the last five to seven years when I started saying, ‘You know, screw it, I’m not going to pussyfoot around issues anymore.’

“I kind of say what I think. And if I feel passionately about something I will be honest about it, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

Heigl, 29, just might be the next big romantic-comedy heroine, joining the conga line of Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore – actresses in whom men see a sex object and women see themselves.

“She’s beautiful, but not in a cold way,” says Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000, which is releasing “27 Dresses,” a film that will test Heigl’s box-office draw. “You feel like you could be working with her in the office.”

In her best-known work – Izzie Stevens on the ABC hit “Grey’s Anatomy,” Alison Scott in the Judd Apatow comedy “Knocked Up” – Heigl comes off as a goddess who ends up falling for sweet, lumpish men.

There is George (T.R. Knight), the menschy fellow intern on “Grey’s,” and Seth Rogan’s frizzy-haired stoner Ben in “Knocked Up.”

But with “27 Dresses,” Heigl is the unabashed star, and she is surrounded this time by more image-appropriate suitors.

The film, written by Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”), features Heigl as Jane, a people-pleasing bridesmaid so dutiful in her role helping friends pull off their weddings that she has no time to find true love herself.

Here Heigl is choosing between Ed Burns as a dull-eyed yet suave boss who is oblivious to Jane’s feelings for him, and James Marsden (“Enchanted”) as her romantic foil, a cute-boy cynical reporter who covers weddings for his New York daily newspaper.

It’s just the kind of hearts-and-flowers, all-about-me romantic comedy that prompted Apatow to offer his bracingly funny “Knocked Up” – in which a bemused stoner stumbles into a one-night stand with an otherwise unattainable blond that leads him into a forced march toward coldblooded responsibility.

Heigl, of course, was that one-night stand, and her character helped enable Apatow to say all those things about immature men and the women who bring them down. But she still had to make us believe that Alison would see into the best of Ben’s nature and ride off into the sunset with him (and their baby).

“I think people need to understand that (life is) not all about finding the most charming, sexy, fabulous guy and then making him yours,” Heigl says of the difference between the two films. “(But) of course (in) ‘27 Dresses’ she does just that.”

Heigl welcomes both the more jaundiced view of “Knocked Up” and the fanciful formula of “27 Dresses.” This is someone, after all, who counts “Pretty Woman” among her all-time favorite movies but also can’t stop watching “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Her views on the male-female dynamics in “27 Dresses” were much tamer than the sentiments she expressed in the January issue of Vanity Fair, in which she said of “Knocked Up”:

“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.”

Heigl later released a quote that reaffirmed her admiration of the movie, lest anyone think she was biting the hand that had made her viable as a romantic comedy star.

“I wouldn’t have said anything at all, except that it was getting so much attention,” she says. “It would have just gone away had I said nothing at all. Because it wasn’t that interesting, and it wasn’t that outrageous.”

More infamously, she publicly chastised then-“Grey’s” co-star Isaiah Washington backstage at last year’s Golden Globe Awards in a continuation of the controversy sparked by Washington’s alleged homophobic slur against castmate Knight.

“The sort of unwritten code is you say nothing,” Heigl said. “You say nothing, you turn the question around or you spin it in a good light, and that’s how you deal with these sort of things, you don’t address it, you don’t bring it up and you don’t have an opinion.”

But she openly questions the direction of her character on her show, and was one of the first celebrities to publicly declare that she wouldn’t attend the Golden Globe Awards because of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.

“I don’t particularly enjoy it,” she says of the two times she’s joined the picket line, both at the behest of “Grey’s” creator Shonda Rhimes. “I’m not great with chanting, and I don’t like circling around and around for hours or holding a sign. I do it when my boss asks me to.”

Heigl has been managed by her mother, Nancy, since she was 9 and began modeling for Sears catalogs while a child in New Canaan, Conn.

She acted through high school (most notably opposite Gerard Depardieu in “My Father the Hero”) before moving to L.A. with her mother to pursue a show business career more aggressively. Her parents by then were divorced.

Heigl and her mother remain business partners.

“She doesn’t love reading scripts,” Heigl said, “so I usually read the scripts and I’ll say, ‘I love this role,’ and she’ll say, ‘OK.’ At the end of the day I’m the person who has to love this.”