It’s a common refrain by women targeting other women — who does she think she is? It’s a tribal thing. And now, Katherine Heigl is being told to shut it by NY Mag (thanks for the link, ONTD). What this shows is that Heigl may have passed into David Caruso “ungrateful star” territory. That means instead of going to the top she’ll be stranded at base camp for a while, maybe a long while. Is it fair? Nope. But it is the way things work. You have to be a super star to be able to get away with mouthing off and even then it can cost you. I find myself on Heigl’s side this time, though. I like that she mouths off and I like what she has to say so I’m not going to join in on the tampon throwing (“plug it up”).
But, if you’ll indulge me a point-by-point:
So you‚Äôve acted out once again (no pun intended!). You‚Äôve withdrawn your name from Emmy eligibility, because, in your words, ”I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.” And now you‚Äôve started a fight with the writers of Grey‚Äôs Anatomy. Their feelings are hurt, Katie: “It’s an ungrateful slap in the face,” one show insider told EW. You actually won the Emmy for supporting actress last year, which was really so lovely for you. So why, this year, are you so sure your material doesn‚Äôt even warrant a nomination? Let‚Äôs think.
Again, I don’t agree that she was insulting the writers at all – she speaks the truth. And the Emmy voters are inclined to vote for the same person over and over again, whether they deserve it or not. Taking out her name gives other more deserving players a chance to win. As for the writing for her character – yeah, a slap in the face is what the writers deserve. Major suckage there, folks. Why pretend any different?
Okay, Heigl, we agree that Izzie’s story lines have become increasingly marginal and unbelievable. Lately, everyone on the show seems to think that Izzie’s completely irritating. So do we! We actually groan aloud when your perky face appears onscreen! There’s a theory we have about this, Katherine, so listen closely. Have you ever thought that maybe the writers are incorporating your own personality into that of your character? Because we read a lot of women’s magazine and gossip sites, and we think we kind of know you at this point. And guess what? You’re totally annoying and self-righteous, just like Izzie!
Yes, blame the actor when the writing sucks. Good one! The worst move was having Heigl have a romantic entanglement with Knight for ratings gold. It sold out her character who was already on the fringes anyway after the dying guy, the clinic, the adopted-away baby. Such a huge mistake it almost ruined the show. And that’s….Heigl’s fault? They should have quit while they were ahead – given Izzie some real problems to deal with instead of making her break up a marriage on the show and thus making everyone hate her. They needed sex on the show and there weren’t many available men so … George? Bad idea for all involved. Now Callie is dabbling with Dr. Hahn, George is flailing about with Meredith’s kid sister and Izzie is, well, who knows anymore.
Of course, we, too, were offended by Isaiah Washington. He called your on- and-off-screen best friend, T.R. Knight, a faggot, and that’s just uncalled for. You established yourself as Knight’s defender and kept speaking to the press about how Washington should be fired. So we guess that’s nice of you and all, but you really should have let your friend fight his own battle. You ended up looking pretty darn priggish.
Yes, god forbid she looks priggish instead of standing idly by. Let’s always remember when someone wrongs our friends we should remain silent because our own careers are at stake. Let’s keep our priorities in order! We are the only the thing that matters. How we are testing in Canoga Park is the only thing that matters. Ratings! Careers! Oscars! By all means, remain silent or risk everything.
And then (and then!) you called your own hit movie, Knocked Up, “a little sexist.” You have a right to your opinion, and we might even agree with you. But you were Apatow’s first choice for that movie, you did it, you made lots of money, and it made you a certified movie star. What possessed you to bash it? Do you think you’re above the work that you do? It was a comedy, and you profited tremendously. You’re no Streep, honey, and even she does Abba with a smile.
Well, here is where I agree with you. The time to talk about how sexist the character was wasn’t in the post publicity phase. If she didn’t like the part she shouldn’t have taken the role. Also, couldn’t she have charmed Apatow and Co. into writing her character better? If charm didn’t work perhaps she could have stayed in her trailer until better pages were delivered. However, the fact remains that the character is poorly written.
[snip]
So please take our advice. Grey’s Anatomy is a soap opera. Get off your high horse, missy. You talk all about the integrity of the Academy? Ha! You know they’re giving an Emmy to a reality-TV show host this year, right? Stop pissing off your writers and directors and castmates. We want to like you, Katherine, really. Please stop making it so hard to do so.
Yes, by all means, shut up and be a good little girl. Your career and likability among the press depends on it.
Thanks Bryan Samolinski –
that says it quite well.
I personally didn’t think she was given quality-enough material last year to warrant a nomination…much less, a win.
Nevertheless, it was a balsy move on her part, but I sort of like it.
Why can’t she speak her mind if she chooses? If her career suffers because of it, she made her bed…. so to speak. And yeah, Grey’s Anatomy pretty much did suck this year. She knows that. Why not say something? And obviously she’s close enough to her Knocked Up character to have strong feelings about the film. I love that movie and happen to think she did a great job. And yeah maybe it is a bit sexist but seriously who cares? It’s a screwball comedy that just happens to be pretty well-done.
Wow, what the fuck is this uproar all about anyway?
Heigl took her name out of contention because she didn’t feel she warranted a nom.
When’s the last time that’s happened anyway?
I know we live in cynical times, in not so nice times, but Jesus Christ I ask you all this:
SO WHAT?
Seriously, what the fuck?
Stop bashing Katherine Heigl !!!!
There are not so many young beautiful american actresses at the moment
Let me just say up front I am not a big fan of Heigl. I liked her in KNOCKED UP, but that’s about it. However, I am amazed at how vituperative some people’s reactions are to her. I don’t watch GREY’S ANATOMY, so I don’t know if any of it has to do with the character she plays, but head over to the GA forums at TelevisionWithoutPity, say, and you’d think she was the Anti-Christ or something. I can understand the residual backlash she got when she spoke up during the whole Isaiah Washington/T.R. Knight brouhaha, but I find the rest somewhat baffling. You’d think she spent her spare time killing puppies or something.
I have not watched one episode of Grey’s Anatomy, so I can’t comment on on the quality of the show. Her job as an Actress is not to soothe other people’s egos. Some people that work in the industry are way too sensitive.
If she doesn’t like the writing, she has every right to say so publicly. And, from what I have been reading, but aren’t disagreeing with the fact that her character hasn’t had much to do this season. So, the writing for her character has been bad. I don’t see anybody commenting on the exceptional caliber of the writing for character. So, was she is saying is true, but she shouldn’t say it because some might feelings hurt.
Some of the comments here make me think of Mary Tyler Moore’s character in the film “Ordinary People”. Everything has to look great, everybody needs to be nice and get along, and what other people think is more important than anything else. It doesn’t matter what is really going on, as long as everybody is nice to each other and everything is in the proper place.
Saltire — you nailed it. I have been trying to figure out a way to express my thoughts about all this but you beat me to it.
I don’t know what her reasons were, & I won’t try to guess.
True, it was probably unnecessary to publically criticise the show’s writers…
But then again, heck – why not?
I think its awesome that she has the ‘balls’ (so to speak) to remove her name. It is a real slap to the Emmys, but they need one. Don’t crucify her too quickly for being outspoken, at least she’s an actress with more than fleeting fame on her mind. She’s an actual human being, with ambitions beyond awards and ratings.
Let’s not tell her how to manage her career, based on what? how things ‘should be’? ’10 quick rules for being a perfect starlet?’
Her move, necessary or not, strikes me as indicating a certain insistant integrity, that there are things that are more important to her than her star status, & she’s not willing to get her self sucked up by the Hollywood machine. I say good for her. Its not easy to do that tactfully. Most wouldn’t risk it at all.
& Greys has become so super suck & her character so super annoying & contradictory. (Most appalling pretentious-Greys-monologie-rant speech EVER – “I’m bambi… if anyone is a ridiculous cartoon character here, its me…” [puke in my mouth a little. That was the last time I was able to watch more than 10 minutes of Greys].
& amp; May I second that Chandra Wilson is amazing? & has come off the best this season. She’s the only reason I tune in, her & Patrick Dempsey. I also think Ellen Pompeo has been harshly ignored. I think she’s wonderful & has done wonders with the character. TR Knight should be fired. He’s more annoying than 10 Izzie’s…
Though I don’t watch this show nor have special knowledge of this actress, so I can’t say if she’s right or wrong, I loved the point-by-point exposition.
But, isn’t it lovely that they have to submit their own material to be nominated? I guess someone else from production does for them, but I like the mental image I made in my mind: Katherine Heigl at home, filling a form with the personal information, glueing a face picture in a small box on the top of the page, and putting it together with an old VHS tape with the name “Izzy Stevens” written on it, on an envelope to be delivered.
I think there are more tactful and professional ways of expressing dissatisfaction with the material one is given. Yes, that means nicer. It’s one thing to call out Isiah Washington for being a homophobic jerk, but it’s a different thing to call out the people who give you words to say. Have the writers given Izzy subpar material? Of course. Was there a strike that contributed to this? DUH. Tact and professionalism have nothing to do with gender. If you have a problem with a coworker you go into a back room and tell them their work is shit. You don’t tell the entire planet and humiliate them.
I do think that if a male actor said what she had said, there would be less anger from the media. But I’m not the media, and I don’t care what gender Katherine Heigl is. There is a right way to say something and a wrong way to say something. And she sure as hell did not chose the right way.
I said it when this first became an issue and I’ll say it again: I don’t care why she didn’t put her name in. I’m just glad that she didn’t. The Emmy people do so much mindless voting for familiar names that there’s no way that something that could possibly detract from such actions is a bad thing. I’ve always maintained that past winners should be made ineligible since it’s the only fool-proof way to force the voters to look at new performances.
There is, of course, yet another way to take this news. Could it be that she thinks Chandra Wilson (or Sandra Oh/Sara Ramirez/insert female Grey’s co-star here) were more deserving?
We’ve seen her stand up SO publicly for TR Knight. Perhaps it’s a genuine hope that by removing herself (knowing that the often lazy Emmy voters seem to hit redial one too many times) she opens the doors for one of her strong co-stars who HAD a stronger storyline? Bailey’s (Wilson) battle for work and family? Callie’s (ramirez) coming to grips with her feelings about Dr.Hahn? Heck even Ellen Pompeo (who often comes off as extremely unsympathetic, and more often pathetic) has a good chance to shine with better material.
Truth is, whatever the reason, Izzy Stevens had no direction as a character. I respect what she did. It’s not like others who win 4-5 in a row and as a “grand gesture” remove their names fron consideration.
Sometimes the brightest people find an embarrassment of riches…well…embarrassing.
Yes a typical response. Truth matters. Honesty matters. But we don’t walk around and call people ugly. Tact matters.
Having had some experience working on an ensemble show where some of the actors deserved Emmy noms and never saw them…I get what she is saying. I worked crew for three years on Once And Again, and I am telling you, Susanna Thompson, Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Whelan all three deserved to be nominated for that show. But, the problem is, and I think Heigl knows this, that if your show isn’t highly rated and/or watched. if your producers and/or network don’t campaign like hell for you…there is little to no chance of ever getting recognized!
It does make the whole process a joke.
Maybe she was just trying to get attention to this problem in the academy.
Maybe she was just embarrassed that she won last year when others more deserving went without notice. Maybe she noticed that the same people tend to win year after year.
There is still a lot of popularity contest to this acting award and she knows it.
i don’t think it makes her a diva.
I think you make a great point Sasha. She had every right to reveal the truth. However, wit and tact are somehat needed when making a point. She just laid it out there. I mean, let’s face it, everyone screws up. The writers aren’t perfect. But at the same time, these are the people who did write your emmy episode. These are the people who helped make Izzie great. But, we all can agree, Grey’s wasn’t amazing this year. It was amazing by the end, but not at the beginning.
I think Heigl is a very good actress, a little outspoken, but she has a right. But having a right and playing the Hollywood game are two different things. She may win the battle, but ultimately loose the war.
And need we be reminded, before this even occurred, she was fighting with the producers about salary after she made Knocked Up. She better do extreme damage control if she wants to stay on the show because let’s be honest, she ain’t no julia roberts just yet.
She had it coming. She wasn’t even nominated and if the writing was as weak as she made it sound she wasn’t going to be nominated in the first place. And in case she was to be nomiated it would have been because of her performance not the writing (the two are different things).
So, in either case she just shown her self to be a pretentious little diva. And she hasn’t earned the right to be that yet.
Since when is it classier to lie? The entire industry would have known that wasn’t the truth. A-list TV stars, particularly ones who have pretty good odds at taking the award home, don’t just forget to submit their tapes for consideration.
And there are many who would disagree with you, Euan, about whether she deserved it, whether she knew it and why she won.
TO be fair to her, she didn’t deserve it last year (and she knew as much), but the emmy voters obviously voted for her in light of her (at the time) promising movie career and murmerings of ‘the next Julia Roberts’ etc. (- I know it sounds ridiculous but I’m pretty sure that was the kind of thing being mentioned – remember, a respectable amount of Knocked Up’s success was seen to be down to her, and she was set to star in her very own rom-com)
Although I doubt she would have benefited from such voting this year, based on her name-recognition alone, she probably would have gotten a nomination , and good on her for avoiding any such uncomfortable situation – remember Ellen Burstyn controversy from last year.
But honestly, it would have been far more classier for her to simply lie and claim she forgot to do it.
RichardA, thank you for typifying the kind of backlash Katherine faces for being outspoken and critical. Since when does “saavy” equate to doing things the “nice” way? If this were a male actor, would you be saying he needed to be nicer? The problem is, actresses in Hollywood are expected to suck at the teat of the predominantly male establishment, no more so than when they become hot commodities. Katherine already pretty saavy, if a little (a lot?) ‘talk first, think later’. She doesn’t need to be nice, and if she were a male actor, there’d be criticism, of course but not a witch hunt like this seems to have become, and few would be saying that actor needed to be nice to get what he wants.
I may not always like what Katherine says or does, and I would not argue that she doesn’t have a pretty healthy ego, but I refuse to buy into the notion that what she said or did warrants the kind of irrational hate-on the media are having with this.
(Heck, I even LIKE her and George together, and I can admit that after having Izzie cut Denny’s wire, making her a part of breaking up George’s marriage was outright character assassination, maybe the most grossly irresponsible creative decision I’ve seen a television show make. I don’t mind a bit that they’ve been publicly criticized by their cast, and that includes Patrick Dempsey and Ellen Pompeo who BOTH spoke out about the writing on the show themselves this year, and to major publications like EW, not The Envelope. No backlash for them, though.)
Greys suck I couldn’t see why she’d want to get nominated for it anyway.
Lady needs to be saavy. There are nicer ways to get your way.
Andre, that’s funny because I was going to take out that line but forgot somewhere between writing it and posting it, lol. I’ll take it out; I agree with you.
And I also agree about the Emmy speech thing – so what if they got her name wrong.
I agree with some of this, but the Hitler comment was downright absurd. C’mon, this is an article about Emmy’s, a starlet and a soap-opera-disguised-as-prime-time-drama. So now criticizing Katherine Heigl earns you a friendship with Adolf Hitler? What is this, Fox News? Does not liking “Million Dollar Baby” make me a “secret muslim”? =P
Sasha, for me personally, I agree with what she said, too. It’s just the way she words her words and the tone she uses that I don’t support. It’s like when she won the Emmy last year and told everyone how to pronounce her name. Yeah, it’s true, you should pronounce it right, but the tone she used wasn’t the right one. You can express your point without coming off as snooty, which is something she seems to have a problem doing.
THANK YOU SASHA! Finally! I agree with everything you said.
I would like to add that this is wrong “But you were Apatow’s first choice for that movie,” well you didn’t write that sasha but whoever did was wrong. Anne Hathaway was cast in the role and then dropped out.