Beyond looks
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. That makes for some pretty stiff competition for the limited number of plum movie roles being offered.
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 opened 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 home, Biel says she wasn’t trying to be troublesome or arrogant when she turned down the role. And she fully understands the competitive nature of the movie business.
“Listen, it’s impossible to not understand that,” she explains. “You go out on auditions, and you keep running into the same people. You’re all competing for the same roles.
“But I had just come off two action movies (‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Blade: Trinity’), and I was determined not to be Hollywood’s new action chick. I think I have more to offer than that.
“I want to go back and forth between genres. I want to do a love story one day and a comedy with Will Ferrell the next. That will never happen if you keep accepting the same kind of roles over and over again. And, as long as you’re willing to accept them, they will keep offering the same roles over and over again.”
The 23-year-old actress took a break from her career to wait for a different kind of role to be offered. While waiting for work in a competitive market did get a little “scary” at times, she says, the strategy paid off.
She not only got parts in two upcoming nonaction 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.
“What I wanted was a real American woman, with a certain kind of heartland beauty, intelligence and integrity,” he says. “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. I wasn’t going to settle for anyone but Jessica in this film.”
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 breaks from formation after being damaged by a lightning strike and sets out on a deadly mission of its own that could spark a nuclear confrontation.
The 5-foot-7 Biel, who worked out extensively for “Blade: Trinity,” continued her six-days-a-week regimen when she began “Stealth.”
“I had minimal training on flight simulators compared to Josh because I was busy on another movie, but I did get a chance to work out,” she says. “It would have been a joke if I didn’t look like I could physically control an aircraft like that.”
Raised in the scenic college town of Boulder, Colo., Biel had her sights on a career in show business since she was 8.
“I was one of those children you see in home movies who are always hamming it up in front of the camera,” she says with a little hint of embarrassment. “I was the one with the ‘Look at me’ expression on her face.”
She appeared in local musical productions and already had done some modeling and commercial work before her ninth birthday. At the age of 11, she and her mother began flying to Los Angeles for the annual TV pilot season.
On their third trip, 14-year-old Jessica got the role of Mary Camden in the series “7th Heaven,” and, almost simultaneously, won a role in the 1997 film “Ulee’s Gold” opposite Peter Fonda.
She stayed on the TV series for five seasons, managing to fit in a few movie roles and three semesters at Tufts University in Boston during breaks.
Her schooling has led some in the industry to see Biel as a thinking man’s sex symbol, but in Hollywood, that usually translates to just plain sex symbol.
One of her early film roles was the 2001 movie “Summer Catch,” in which Biel played a rich girl on Cape Cod being pursued by a young baseball player (Freddie Prinze Jr.) from the wrong side of the tracks.
It is a generally forgettable film, with the exception of one scene by a swimming pool where Prinze, sweating from mowing her father’s lawn, admires Biel’s form as she climbs out of the pool in slow motion.
Biel says she understands that sex sells movies, but she looks forward to the day when her looks will not be the reason she is hired for a job.
“This movie (‘Stealth’) is a serious film, and I don’t believe I was hired for my looks,” she says. “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,” she adds with a smile and a slight shrug of resignation. “If I don’t want to do it, I’m sure there are plenty of girls who will.”