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Katherine Heigl: 'I was publicly shamed – and I took it really personally'

Katherine Heigl shot for Stella magazine - Williams and Hirakawa
Katherine Heigl shot for Stella magazine - Williams and Hirakawa
Stella magazine promotion
Stella magazine promotion

Katherine Heigl kicks her leg high up into the air to show off the leg warmers she’s wearing over a pair of Spanx leggings, with the perfect chutzpah of a 42-year-old who no longer gives a damn what anybody thinks. ‘That’s it. All day, every day!’ she cackles, from the farmhouse-style kitchen of the sprawling Utah ranch she’s lived on for the past decade with her musician husband Josh Kelley and their three children.

Lockdown life in the mountains is a million miles away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and Katherine – best known for starring in romcoms like Knocked Up (2007) and 27 Dresses (2008), as well as winning an Emmy for hit US medical drama Grey’s Anatomy – wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘There was something about turning 40 that felt like freedom to me,’ she reflects, her long blonde hair scraped back in a bun. ‘I could settle into who I am and not apologise so much.’

After almost 30 years in the industry (she made her film debut in the coming-of-age drama That Night, at the tender age of 13), Katherine’s fourth decade might actually prove to be the most fruitful. Things have been quiet on the acting front recently – the last time we saw her she was stepping into Meghan Markle’s shoes in the US legal drama Suits in 2018 – but that’s set to change.

Katherine Heigl - Williams and Hirakawa
Katherine Heigl - Williams and Hirakawa

Next month she stars in Netflix’s bingeworthy 10-part adaptation of the Kristin Hannah novel Firefly Lane (on which she is also an executive producer), and plays the mother of a schizophrenic teenager in the complex thriller Fear of Rain, opposite Harry Connick Jnr. She is also set to produce and star as Victoria Woodhull, who became the first woman to run for US President in 1872, in the forthcoming TV series Woodhull.

Firefly Lane charts the ups and downs of a lifelong friendship between two women, Tully (played by Katherine) and and Kate (Sarah Chalke). Set in the Pacific Northwest, and dipping in and out of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, Katherine is formidable as successful, single and sassy Tully Hart. ‘It was initially scary to get into Tully’s headspace because she is so confident,’ admits Katherine. ‘But there is remarkable freedom in playing somebody like that. All your own neuroses take a back seat when you play a woman who is totally comfortable in her own skin and her own sexuality.’

Firefly Lane - Netflix
Firefly Lane - Netflix

Could it be that, despite commanding £5 million a film at the height of her career, she’s actually playing more interesting characters now? Katherine nods. ‘This has been an amazing few years because it’s not over!’ she laughs. ‘I always knew there were lots of wonderful stories to tell about women in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, but I didn’t know anybody would want to tell them. This is an industry, for women especially, that feeds on the young. I was the young, up-and-coming actress and you think you have an expiration date because, for a long time in Hollywood, you kind of did.’

Katherine is all too familiar with expiration dates. There was, after all, a time in her career, shortly after her rapid rise to the top in 2007, when everything came crashing back down. It began in 2008, when, in a now infamous Vanity Fair interview, she described Knocked Up as ‘a little sexist’. ‘It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight,’ she said, ‘and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.’

She later apologised, clarifying her comments with, ‘I liked the movie a lot. I just didn’t like me [her character]. Judd [Apatow] allows everyone to be very free and improvise and whatever and afterwards, I was like, “Why is that where I went with this? What an asshole she is!”’ But the damage was done.

Knocked Up - Suzanne Hanover
Knocked Up - Suzanne Hanover

That same year, when she decided not to enter herself into the Emmy race for her role as Izzie Stevens in Grey’s Anatomy, saying, ‘I did not feel I was given the material this season to warrant a nomination,’ it only cemented her reputation as ungrateful and outspoken. Again, she apologised – this time to the show’s creator Shonda Rhimes. Having won the Emmy the previous year, Heigl claimed it wasn’t the ‘material’ she was unhappy with, but rather her performance.

From that moment on, she was branded difficult to work with – career suicide for a star of Katherine’s bankability. Even more disturbing was that her undoing was the direct result of a couple of comments made in interviews. Katherine had been cancelled before cancel culture was even a thing.

‘It was this giant snowball effect,’ she recalls, shaking her head, when I bring it up. ‘The more conscious of it I was, the more afraid I was, and the more I would say something stupid. It was this vicious cycle. It was a public shaming. Even a little public bullying. And I took it really, really personally. It had me confused about my own worth because I put all my value in other people’s opinions and suddenly those opinions changed.’

In Grey's Anatomy, 2005-2010
In Grey's Anatomy, 2005-2010

Katherine left Grey’s Anatomy after five years in 2010 ‘to focus on family’, and she and Kelley – they married in 2007 after meeting on the set of one of his music videos – relocated from LA to Utah. Katherine turned her focus to smaller projects that would keep her closer to home, and on which she could also act as executive producer, where possible.

‘Getting out of the way for a while,’ as she describes it, ‘was very healing. It was a good time to just figure myself out. I’m not sure why I’ve spent such a long time not knowing who I am…’

It was a journey of self-healing and self-awareness through therapy, meditation, crystals, reiki and acupuncture; things she still practises today. ‘My thoughts controlled me,’ she recalls. ‘If I felt afraid that I wasn’t going to be liked or loved or appreciated, my reaction was always negative. So wanting to change that knee-jerk response was huge for me. I’m no guru, I still f—k it up regularly, but at least I’m trying now, whereas before, I didn’t even know to.’

Today, she is reflective but assertive and keen not to dwell on any regrets. ‘At this point in my life, I’m coming from less insecurity and uncertainty. I know what kind of person I am and I know there would be nothing that I could say that would be intentionally harmful to anybody, and if somebody chose to take it that way, that’s on them.’

Katherine Heigl photographed for Stella magazine. She wears: coat, Vince (vince.com). Dress, Nanushka (nanuska.com). Boots, Staud (staud.clothing) - Williams and Hirakawa
Katherine Heigl photographed for Stella magazine. She wears: coat, Vince (vince.com). Dress, Nanushka (nanuska.com). Boots, Staud (staud.clothing) - Williams and Hirakawa

Katherine and her mother, Nancy, who is also her manager, set up Abishag Productions in 2007. ‘Abishag’ is a character from the Robert Frost poem Provide, Provide. ‘It’s a reminder that youth, beauty and fame are not all I have and are not all that’s important to me,’ she says.

A voracious reader, Katherine has, since her 30s, been quietly optioning books for adaptation à la Reese Witherspoon (whose company Hello Sunshine produced TV’s Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere). And while she’s not well known for pursuing this endeavour, that looks set to change with Woodhull. ‘I have such big hopes for this one,’ she says of the series. ‘It’s another extraordinary female role – they are out there.’

Would she consider producing a romcom, or are those days now long gone? ‘I hope not,’ laughs Katherine, who added The Ugly Truth (2009) and Life As We Know It (2010) to her repertoire post-Knocked Up. ‘I love doing them. I just have a tendency to overdo it. I think everyone was sick of my romantic comedies!’

Katherine Heigl and her mother Nancy - Instagram @katherineheigl
Katherine Heigl and her mother Nancy - Instagram @katherineheigl

I’m fascinated by the dynamic between Katherine and her mother Nancy, who has managed her career from the beginning (she started out modelling as a child), who gave her the ‘strength and courage’ to get through the toughest time in her career, and who is still, at 77, ‘very sharp, very smart and very capable’.

‘I don’t know how this happened,’ she says. ‘It’s not just because I love my mother and she loves me, but there is an ease about our relationship and mutual respect.’

The pair are so close that following her parents’ divorce in 1997, they moved into a house in Malibu together. Today, Nancy lives a stone’s throw away in Utah and is in a lockdown bubble with Katherine’s family, while her father lives in Atlanta. So Nancy is the Kate to Katherine’s Tully? ‘[If a best friend is] somebody that you see and talk to all the time, who’s intimately involved in your life, in your dreams, your loves and your wishes, well that’s my mom. We talk twice a day. We get our nails done together. We go grocery shopping. We have dinners together once a week.

‘But she’s still very much my mother. She still bosses me around and tells me what to do and I have to be like, “Mom! Calm down.” But there is an easy connection between us.’

One of four siblings growing up in Connecticut, Katherine describes her early years as ‘pretty tumultuous’. She was eight years old when her brother, Jason, was killed in a car accident at the age of 15. ‘It changes your life. It changes your family. Nothing was ever the same again,’ explains Katherine, who set up an animal rescue charity, The Jason Debus Heigl Foundation, in 2008, as her brother’s legacy. ‘For my sister and me, it was about watching the people you most depend on and need, drowning. A year or two later we joined the [Mormon] church and it gave our family this stability, structure and purpose. It kind of saved our parents.’

Katherine doesn’t practise Mormonism today, but as mother to three children (Naleigh, 12, who she adopted from Korea as a baby, and named after her mother Nancy and her sister Meg Leigh, Adalaide, eight, who she adopted from the US, and Joshua, who she gave birth to in 2016), she is determined for their ‘childhood to be a childhood’.

Does she feel like she missed out on anything working from such a young age? ‘There were certain things I was bummed about missing, but my mother said to me, “Listen, you don’t have to do this, but if you really want to, then you have to learn now how to be a professional. You can’t have your cake and eat it too!”’

Josh Kelley and Katherine Heigl  - Getty
Josh Kelley and Katherine Heigl - Getty

Katherine’s parents adopted six-month-old Meg from Korea three years before Katherine was born. Despite already having two biological children, they felt determined to give a home to a child who needed it.

The close bond she has with her sister had a profound impact on how Katherine would go on to build her own family. ‘I wanted my family to resemble the one I came from,’ she says. ‘My mother had three out of her body and one put into her arms, and said it does not influence love whether they are of your blood or not, because they are of your spirit. I always knew that. I knew I wanted to be a mother and I knew there were children who needed a mother.’

Katherine has been a stay-at-home mum for the best part of a year, thanks to the pandemic. It’s the longest she hasn’t gone out to work in, well, 30 years. But she appears to be taking it in her stride, despite having her hands full with three children, five dogs and three cats – not to mention the horses, chickens, goats, donkeys and pigs on the ranch.

‘This hasn’t been as hard on me as it has been for some because I like being home. I’m not missing parties. I’d like to stop having to make dinner,’ she laughs. ‘I look at the clock, like, “Is it time to make a drink, put the kids to bed and watch Bridgerton?”’

Jokes aside, Katherine and her husband are a creative pair who just might put us all to shame with their efforts during lockdown. Katherine has started a greenhouse and taken online courses in herbology; Josh makes leather satchels and built what Katherine describes as a ‘marriage-saving’ shack.

‘He’s so proud of his shack,’ she smiles. ‘He should be. It’s an awesome space. We’ll put Naleigh in charge: [the children] will be watching TV in our home and we’re in the shed! We’ve got a record player and faux-skin rugs and we’ll go in with cocktails, it’s so cosy.’

It sounds the ideal place to curl up and watch Firefly Lane. ‘I love how the show’s turned out,’ she says. ‘I always feel nervous like I’m overselling it and people could be like, “I didn’t think it was that good!” But I love it. I love the music. I love the look. I love the story.’

It’s about time, isn’t it? Katherine takes a deep breath. ‘For me, it feels like the culmination of all the things that I’ve learnt after all these years. It feels like a giant relief.’

‘Firefly Lane’ is on Netflix from Wednesday. ‘Fear of Rain’ comes to VOD on 12 February and to Blu-ray and DVD 16 February

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