Be confident. Go for it," Biel suggests for nervous males suffering like Lem. I would like to take you out some place exciting'. Planet 51 is a twist on the usual sci-fi movie, with humans portrayed as the alien invaders. American astronaut Chuck Baker Johnson lands on Planet 51 and discovers it inhabited by little green creatures, including Neera and Lem.
Biel, whose breakthrough role was in the TV series 7th Heaven , has an eclectic slate of films opening in theatres the next year. She stars alongside Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas in the potential Oscar nominee, Easy Virtue ; is the lead in the romantic comedy Nailed about a waitress who has a nail accidently lodged in her head; and she is currently filming the potential blockbuster, The A-Team.
The conversation quickly settles on her vexed post-TV career, which goes like this: ill-conceived remake of famous horror film; tragic Bret Easton Ellis adaptation; even more tragic Kim Basinger vehicle; meaningless third installment of Blade franchise; terrible movie; terrible movie. The Illusionist! Though it was not a commercial hit, it is a pleasure to watch, and Biel is believable as a Viennese woman from the turn of the last century.
But with The Illusionist I felt it more than ever, that people really started to see me differently. And then there is Biel's run of bad luck with great directors. Cameron Crowe cast her in Elizabethtown, a film that flopped on a grand scale, and David O. Russell gave her the lead in Nailed, based on Kristin Gore's novel Sammy's Hill, about a woman with no health insurance who gets a nail lodged in her head and goes to Washington to fight for justice.
That was in , and with each passing month it grows ever less likely that her most challenging film work to date will make it to the screen. Meanwhile, the film industry has gone through a major upheaval since the recession. Nobody wants to make dramas. And that's what we all want to do. Those can be great, but you don't want to do only those kinds of films. You have to have a spinach salad every now and again.
Biel plays a neurotic sports publicist and toxic bachelorette. And I get to do some broad comedy; it's a little Lucille Ball-esque. Biel and Garner became friends on the shoot. It's hard to play drunk, not to overdo it. But she did it in such a subtle, real, kind of pathetic but very, very deeply funny way.
I was, take one, totally impressed. The dearth of good material has pushed Biel to diversify her portfolio, so to speak. On the last night, she received a rousing standing ovation from 17, people.
The next morning we wake up to discover that the snow has turned to rain. By the time we arrive at the base of the mountain, there is only one gondola running, and the line stretches all the way through the village. Deflated, we decide to eat breakfast in a honky-tonk saloon that reeks of last night's beer. I've been looking at Rihanna a lot, checking her out.
She's got something going on that I am sort of craving a little bit. I could not tell whether this was a Freudian slip, some worrisome Single White Female voodoo, or a calculated little piece of spin designed to show me that she is unthreatened by the rumors that her man has eyes for the diva from Barbados. Biel and Timberlake have been an item since and for a long time looked like a happy couple.
Recently, however, they have had to endure all manner of tabloid speculation about their private lives. But you have to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. Honestly, I look at a magazine and they know more than I do. It's the most precious thing that I have in my life, and I care about it so much that I don't care about what anyone says or thinks.
I have just not addressed it in any real way, and I'm not going to. It's mine. And I really like that about it. There is something refreshing about a girl with boundaries, someone who has her priorities in order despite the relentlessness of the tabloids and the strangeness of doing drills in some warehouse far away from her own life.
And if there is a sense that potentially great things await Jessica Biel—that she has not yet shown us who she is and what she is capable of—it's hard not to wonder what exactly is holding her back. One possible answer came up during our dinner, when we were talking about her va-va-voom image—so at odds with how she really is. My eyes get squintier and smaller.
On the red carpet, I'm playing a character. As soon as I get off that thing I think, Oof, wipe that gloss off. I'm wiping and wiping and pulling my hair out and trying to change my outfit. For this reason, reps are mixed on Biel as a stock. I probably would, because our agency needs people who [always] work. But do I think she can go all the way? Ryan Murphy, have you figured out casting for season three of American Horror Story?
If, in so doing, she can successfully convince casting directors to take her seriously for unusual big-screen roles, then all the better. Well, Ryan Reynolds will always need someone to woo.
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