Jessica Biel learnt an early lesson in Hollywood. She had a leading role as a
sweet, innocent character in a hit television series, 7th Heaven. Wouldn’t
it be a great idea, suggested her manager, to do a risqué photo session for
a magazine? It was time to prove that she was a grown-up woman. But the
session went a step further than expected. “I ended up virtually naked,” she
recalls. “The moment it was over, I thought, ‘Oh, no. What have I done?’”
Just 17 at the time, Biel was right to anticipate trouble. The television
producers were furious, and the published pictures dogged her for the
remaining two years of the series. “I sacked my manager and bought the film
from the photographer, but they are still out there on the internet,” she
says with a resigned shrug. “The experience, though, made me grow up fast.”
Fast seems to be her preferred style. When 7th Heaven ended, she relaunched a
film career that had begun when she was 15, playing a rebellious teenager in
the 1997 success Ulee’s Gold. Now 23, she is about to become the real deal.
We meet in the Czech Republic, on her 10th movie set in four years. Her
talent for regular reinvention is clear. After playing the woman who beat
Leatherface in the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then
reshaping her body with seven months of training to become a vampire-hunter
in last year’s Blade: Trinity, she is now clothed in a long dress and
corsets for The Illusionist, set in Vienna in 1900. The cobblestones of
Prague and the soaring towers of country castles are doubling for the
Austrian capital at the turn of the 20th century. “I was not the obvious
choice for this,” she says. “In fact, Liv Tyler was lined up. There were
scheduling problems, and I had a call one night at home in LA to audition
the next day.”
The way she went about this says a lot about Biel’s determination. She spent
the rest of the night practising a middle- European accent. The next
morning, she hired a costume from an antique- clothing store near her house
and had her hair restyled to circa 1900. “I thought, ‘This is either going
to work or I am going to make a complete fool of myself.’ But the moment I
walked into the audition, the producer, Michael London, said, ‘What a great
outfit.’ I immediately relaxed.”
It worked, and she now sits among a cast that includes Paul Giamatti,
following his success in Sideways, and Britain’s Rufus Sewell. The
intriguing drama, to be released next year, is about an illusionist, played
by Edward Norton, who is suspected of dabbling in the dark arts of life
after death. Biel’s Princess Sophie, trapped in an unhappy relationship,
becomes so deeply involved in his illusion, it is suspected that she has
been murdered.
“Jessica looks like a young Julie Christie,” says Jane Garnett, one of the
producers on the film. “The leading woman was always going to be the most
difficult character to cast, because she has to be both glamorous and
intelligent.”
Biel uses the same double punch of looks and brains for her new role as a test
pilot in Stealth, opposite the Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx. The film, set five
years in the future, looks at what might happen if we put too much trust in
computers and machines. The pilots are joined in training by an unmanned
combat air vehicle that develops a mind of its own. While Biel and Foxx
attempt to improve their flying and fighting skills, the unwelcome maverick
machine subverts their tight discipline. What are its real motives? How far
will it go in its uncanny aggression? Can it start a world war? Who is
really in control? “Fortunately, I still looked fit and trim enough after
all my training for Blade: Trinity to be a convincing pilot,” says Biel.
“Then the director, Rob Cohen, told me, ‘The great thing was that you sat
there in the audition without messing with your hair.’ I said, ‘You mean I
got this part because I didn’t mess with my hair while talking to you?’ He
said, ‘Yeah — partly. It made you seem more like a pilot.’ If you thought
too much about the reasons for success and failure in this business, it
would drive you mad overnight.”
Biel’s healthy cynicism should keep her sane. She has managed to complete most
of a degree at the prestigious Tufts University, in Boston, while
masterminding her career. And it is clear that she has been a self-
motivating force, even from her childhood in Boulder, Colorado. “I could not
get enough of acting as a kid,” she says. “My parents just went along with
it and gave me as much support as they could.” That included her mother
taking her to LA for three months at the start of each year during “pilot
season”, when a crop of television dramas and comedies are made, in the hope
of picking up a long-running series. This is how she won her role in 7th
Heaven and tasted early fame. “It’s an odd life,” she says. “You end up
being taught one-to-one in your trailer, rather than at school — so
friendships are fragmented. I did not have a boyfriend, because I never met
boys.”
She has made up for it since, with a couple of long relationships, the second
of which, with the actor Chris Evans, has lasted three years. At the time,
however, she was ready to rebel. “I did not deal well with being a teen
actor,” she says. “I was angry not to be able to cut my hair and dye it
blue, angry that I couldn’t go to prom nights. I was so self- absorbed. I
also got to the stage where I would get on with people much older. Kids my
own age terrified me.”
Biel does not seem like the sort of actress who scares easily. She has calm
hazel eyes, a bright manner and a realistic view of what success means in
Hollywood. “You live life with a series of buts,” she says. “You attend an
audition and you feel you did wonderfully well. Then you get a call from
your agent: ‘They really loved you and said you were great. But you were not
quite right for the part.’ So my only promise to myself is to just do my
best and not get too upset by all the buts.” Such sensible judgment should
work long-term for Biel, who will also appear as Orlando Bloom’s girlfriend
in Elizabethtown, directed by Cameron Crowe. There will be no repeat of her
naivety with photographers. “If I feel there are too many drugs at a party
and people are getting it on in the bedroom, I walk,” she says. And her view
of the famous? “I am not surprised at how many young actors are tempted to
wreck their lives and careers,” she says. “The real surprise is how many
avoid it.”
Stealth opens on August 5, Elizabethtown on October 21, The Illusionist in
2006
