When Katherine Heigl sat down to discuss Knocked Up, one of the biggest films of 2007 and Heigl’s first big film, she decided to challenge the gender dynamics portrayed in it. “It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys,” she said to Vanity Fair. “It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a b***h; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women?”
In the immediate aftermath, she stood by her comments. “It was my opinion and I’m allowed to have one,” she told The Guardian regarding the public backlash. “Isn’t it the land of the free?” Years later, however, as a guest on The Howard Stern Show, Heigl tried to put a different spin on her comments, suggesting that she was actually criticizing her own choices and not those of Judd Apatow, the film’s writer and director.
But it was too late. The negative response to her remarks had already made its mark. “I had never done therapy before, until a couple of years ago. I started going because of the scrutiny,” she told Stern. “I was not handling it well. I was feeling completely like the biggest piece of sh*t on the bottom of your shoe.”
