Katherine Heigl gained the reputation of being someone difficult to work with. Years after, she opened up about what she referred to as Hollywood’s “shunning” in a recent interview with The Washington Post. She admitted that such criticism caused her to feel that she “would rather be deed”.
The actress recalled that the public’s impression of her took a sudden turn once she started to express her thoughts on projects she was working on. She explained, “I may have said a couple of things you didn’t like, but then that escalated to ‘she’s ungrateful,’ then that escalated to ‘she’s difficult’ and that escalated to ‘she’s unprofessional’… What is your definition of difficult? Somebody with an opinion that you don’t like? Now, I’m 42, and that s–t pisses me off.”
She added that the more she apologized for speaking negatively regarding her experiences being in Knocked Up and Grey’s Anatomy, the more she felt like she had done something horribly wrong.
She once worked with James Marsden in 27 Dresses and he told WaPo that Katherine had good intentions saying, “She has very strong convictions and strong opinions on certain things, and she doesn’t back down from you know if she feels like she’s been wrong in any way.”
The actor also believed that she didn’t deserve the backlash she got, explaining, “I’ve always seen that as just strength of character. I can see how that can get construed as being difficult or ungrateful or whatever. But if you know Katie, it’s simply because she has the courage to stand behind something she believes.”
She thought her reputation wouldn’t matter anymore as long as the projects she was working on were profitable. She said, “You can be the most awful, difficult, horrible person on the planet, but if you’re making them money, they’re going to keep hiring you.”
Her experience also affected her mental health. She revealed, “I think my family, my mother, my husband, my friends were scared. And I regret deeply that I scared them like that,” she recalled. “But I just couldn’t control it. I had no tools.”
However, she became stronger after she welcomed her son, Joshua Jr. She said, “I asked my mom and my husband to find me somewhere to go that could help me because I felt like I would rather be dead.”
She added, “I didn’t realize how much anxiety I was living with until I got so bad that I had to really seek help. You can do a lot of inner soul work, but I’m a big fan of Zoloft.”
She has learned her lesson and Katherine to have “a little more gentleness”. She said, “I’ve grown into accepting that ambition is not a dirty word, and that it doesn’t make me less of a feminine, loving, nurturing woman to be ambitious and have big dreams and big goals.”
As reported earlier, in a recent Instagram Live Katy Perry revealed how her daughter Daisy Dove is affecting her life and career.
