I like being choosy: Kate Bosworth
Sara Hall

NEW YORK—Don’t call Kate Bosworth a dream girl. The star of Blue Crush (2002), Beyond the Sea (2004) and Superman Returns (2006) may be beautiful, smart and accomplished, but she doesn’t like to be stereotyped. Use the phrase “dream girl,” and she snaps back. “Which films are you talking about?” she asks heatedly. Well, say, her new film, ‘21,’ in which she plays a glamorous college student involved in a Las Vegas blackjack scam.
“OK,” Bosworth admits after a pause, “but don’t generalise.” ‘It’s just not fair’ Obviously the actress is tired of hearing about how attractive she is. “The whole media explosion of how one looks is so exaggerated, extreme and ridiculous to me,” she complains. “Don’t get me started. I hate the fact that the choice for women is either ‘the fantasy girl’ or ‘the hot girl.’ It’s just not fair. Women are so beautifully complicated, and there’s so much to explore.
“Things are changing slightly,” she says, “but they need to change a lot more. I think the feminist struggle is beginning in a new wave.”
‘I felt lucky with “21”’
The 25-year-old Bosworth is doing her part to improve women’s roles.
“Originally my character in ‘21’ was written so superficially,” she says during a telephone interview. “She didn’t have her own struggle at all. She truly was ‘the hot girl.’ Unfortunately, in the business I’m in, the female characters are the last ones developed, and the good roles are few and far between.
“I felt lucky with ‘21’ because Sony Pictures allowed me to become a collaborator,” Bosworth says. “I was able to give my character a struggle. The fact that her father was a gambler, which is why she has a problem, wasn’t in there at the beginning.”
‘21,’ which will open on March 28 and also stars Kevin Spacey and Jim Sturgess, takes off from a true story about a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who perfected a way to beat casinos at blackjack. Spacey plays their unorthodox math professor, with Sturgess as a brilliant student who needs money to pay for medical school and Laurence Fishburne as a casino enforcer. Bosworth plays Jill, who helps lure Ben (Sturgess) into the scheme. Although the film is a caper in the style of Ocean’s 11 (2001), it has more of a serious undertone, which appealed to Bosworth.
Varied roles
Since coming to notice in Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998), she has varied light roles in such films as Blue Crush and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton (2004) with darker dramas such as The Rules of Attraction (2002), based on Brett Easton Ellis’ novel about sex, drugs and college, and Wonderland (2003), in which she played the girlfriend of porn king/junkie John Holmes (Val Kilmer).
“I am attracted to darker material,” Bosworth says, “even though people try to categorize me in a different way and don’t expect that from me. I like complicated, good female roles.
“I’ve just optioned a book, ‘Lost Girls and Love Hotels,’ because I fell in love with the story,” she says. “What’s so exciting to me is to not be controlled by the industry but to be a part of it and start controlling my own career. That’s so stimulating and inspiring.”
She is developing the project with a friend, Nadia Conners, who co-wrote and co-directed Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary The 11th Hour (2007).
‘I like being choosy’
“I like being choosy,” Bosworth says, “so I don’t make many films, because of that. My decisions are based on the script - and, if the script doesn’t scream at me, I next consider the director and the cast. I like projects that are different.”
Consequently she went from playing Lois Lane as a single mother in “Superman Returns” to a card counter in “21,” then on to a troubled loner in the upcoming drama “The Girl in the Park,” co-starring Sigourney Weaver.
“When we were filming ‘The Girl in the Park,’ I was going through a challenging time,” says Bosworth, who was in the process of splitting up with longtime boyfriend Orlando Bloom. “I was coming into my own as a woman, and that was the first moment I realised how much I needed the outlet I have as an actor. I get to go to work every day and channel my emotions into my work.
“When I first read that script,” she says, “I found the character intoxicating. You’re just drawn to her, even though you know she’s dangerous. I liked her complexity. She’s not just dark or just light - she was a good concoction of the two. Although she does some pretty terrible things, you still root for her.”
Bosworth recently returned from three months in New Zealand, where she made “Laundry Warrior,” co-starring Geoffrey Rush.
“It’s a fantasy that takes place in 1870 in the Old West in a deserted carnival village,” the actress says. “It’s the most physical film I’ve done so far, and I’ve done a couple. This time I got to take up sword-fighting and knife-throwing, and I really enjoyed it”.