Never one to shy away from speaking her mind, Katherine Heigl is probably one of the most honest actresses around. Her outspokenness sets her apart from the other pretty faces, and though it can sometimes get her into trouble with the press, it is for the most part a breath of fresh air in a town where celebrities are fed publicist-approved responses. She’s tough, she’s independent, and if you mess with her friends—namely Grey’s Anatomy co-star and best pal T.R. Knight—she’s going to make her feelings known.

As of right now, though, Heigl’s feeling nothing but good. After a bountiful 2007 which brought her a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for her role as Izzie Stevens on Grey’s Anatomy, a big-screen hit with the comedy Knocked Up, and a winter wedding to singer Josh Kelley, Heigl is gearing up for another year of success.

Her next film is the romantic comedy 27 Dresses, co-starring James Marsden and Edward Burns. Heigl plays Jane, a perennial bridesmaid who dreams of the perfect wedding and has a hopeless crush on her boss (Burns). Things get complicated she meets a cynical newspaper columnist (Marsden), and her boss gets engaged to her younger sister (Malin Ackerman). It’s an adorable movie to be sure, but Heigl is aware that it’s also standard rom-com territory and she knows it requires some suspension of belief, as most movies often do.

“Does anyone really go to a romantic comedy and believe that their life could turn out that way?” she says. “I don’t. The whole point is to escape from your day-to-day, I suppose. That’s why I love romantic comedies so much. Not that the day-to-day is so bad, but it’s the opportunity to sort of fantasize about the perfect. I think these characters have an honesty about them; I just think that the situations are a bit extreme.”

The situations all pretty much revolve around weddings and marriage, topics that Heigl was certainly familiar with during filming. Her character may have been stuck watching her friends find true love over and over again, but Heigl had better luck nabbing the man of her dreams. She was in the process of planning her own wedding during the shoot, although she admits that in real-life she wasn’t always marriage-obsessed. “Jane is very different from me and her worship of weddings is not really how I viewed it,” she says. “I think there was probably a time when I was younger that I felt that way about weddings, that I was that excited about the idea of getting married. But as I grew up I started to put little to no value on marriage and then I met an amazing man and figured I couldn’t really—and didn’t really—want to live without him and it kind of reignited my passion for that sort of celebration and commitment. But I think as I got closer towards the wedding I started to take

it as seriously as Jane might.”
For Heigl’s own ceremony, she didn’t steal any ideas from the script. Her character’s wedding and her wedding turned out to be very different affairs. “Jane ended up having a beach, summer wedding that was very casual and barefoot and fabulous, and I’m having a very formal, Christmas wedding so that right there was a huge difference,” she says. “But they’re both—I think Jane’s wedding was pretty small except for the 27 bridesmaids, so that was pretty similar. What was interesting was that Malin Ackerman was getting married during the filming of the movie. She went off for a week, got married and came back a wife. There was a ton of wedding talk going on in the 3 months we made the movie so we talked every detail through and both of us were super excited. So it was fun to be in the same predicament and then making a movie about it. It was great.”

Though the past few months have been focused on white dresses and tiered cakes, Heigl has also been passionately dedicated to taking her career to the next level. “I’ve spent a lot of years in this town being at the mercy of producers, directors and studios and that sort of thing,” she says. “Not in a terrible way, but just that as an actor you don’t have as much of a voice about the end product. You can show up and interpret the work but as far as the look, feel and vibe of the movie or even the material you don’t have that much say. I’m really excited about the idea of being part of a project from the birth of it on, and helping to create the look and feel of it. I’ve optioned a book that I have no role in, there’s no role for me, but I loved the story so much. So that’s another side of it where there are so many amazing stories out there. I read a lot and the idea of bringing some of them to life, or at least trying to, is really exciting.”

The book Heigl has optioned is called Lost and Found, and it revolves around a recently widowed woman and a dog she finds and bonds with. It was a story Heigl felt a special connection to, in part because she has five dogs of her own! “I’m a big animal person,” she says. “The book is interesting because parts of it are from the dog’s perspective, which I loved. And it was done so well ‘cause I’ve read books before where they’ve kind of done it from the animal’s perspective but this was done so beautifully and simply. It was wonderfully executed so on that level it spoke to me because I gave my dogs personalities. I mean, they have personalities but I give them sort of a ‘if they were a person, this is who they’d be.’”

Heigl is finally getting to do the work she has always dreamed of, but to her, her newfound status in Hollywood is still a bit surreal. “I should really journal more because 10 years from now I’m not going to remember how this all felt,” she says. “Plus it’s really sort of out-of-body because it’s so much and so hard to center yourself to feel it all. And that’s my biggest fear actually. That I’m not slowing down enough to actually really feel it and enjoy it and savor it. It’s so hard to do that when you’re on such a crazy schedule. Even first thing in the morning when I sit outside with my cigarette and my coffee, it’s hard to take it in. It’s scary to do that. You don’t want to be too excited ‘cause you’re afraid it will end, but this I would probably put down as the best year of my life.”
Start filling up those journals, Heigl! We’re sure more good fortune is yet to come.

AndreaTuccillo : TheCinemaSource.com