BILLIE JEAN KING’S CHICAGO LOVE
Tennis legend, the subject of new film, says Chicago ‘ most underrated city’
LOS ANGELES — The mere mention of Chicago brings a big smile to the face of Billie Jean King. “We lived in Chicago for a long time — still have an apartment there,” said the tennis icon during a chat about “Battle of the Sexes,” the new film starring Emma Stone as King.
Despite still owning a Gold Coast condo with her partner, Ilana Kloss, King admitted she regrets not “getting back to the city as much as I’d like. I think it’s the most underrated city in the world. I love the architecture and the fact the lake goes all the way to the horizon.
“We have that view from our place and I love looking at it during the day. And at night, we look down Michigan Avenue, and I just love that too.”
King, 73, wanted to make sure Chicagoans are wellaware of tennis pro Kamau Murray. “He has built this terrific athletic facility and tennis center in South Chicago, which is huge. He’s going to help so many kids learn to play tennis on the South Side of Chicago and in that area. I just love that guy so much, because he is doing a fantastic job of exposing our sport to young people who otherwise wouldn’t know a thing about tennis.
“It’s so important that young people of color learn how great tennis is. Yes, Venus and Serena [ Williams] obviously have done so much for that, but Kamau coached Sloane Stevens who just won the [ U. S.] Open, and won $ 3.7 million in prize money! Everybody in Chicago needs to know about him and what he’s doing.’’
“Battle of the Sexes” ( opening Friday) focuses on King’s famed 1973 tennis match against Bobby Riggs ( played by Steve Carell). King loves the way Stone portrayed her, but explained that after an initial meeting, the actress did not spend a great deal of time with King as she prepped for the role.
“In my 70s, I’m fully formed,” said King, but Stone “wanted to make sure she wasn’t getting that part of me. She needed to be how I was at 29. My voice wasn’t the same, I hadn’t found my voice, and I was so mixed up. Now we’re seeing tons of each other and we’re having a great time! But she did the right thing to put that off while she prepared to play me more than 40 years ago.”
King compared Stone’s preparation to her own for the Riggs match. “I spent two months learning everything I could, not just about how I would play Bobby, but everything about the Astrodome [ where their match was played]. I knew every inch of that arena. I knew where all the entrances and exits and bathrooms were located. I knew who all the ball boys and referees were going to be. . . . I knew I had one shot to beat Bobby, or otherwise women would again be pushed back into a permanent secondary role for a long, long time.”
Ben Stiller: Chicago goes easy on the envy
TORONTO — The whole point of Ben Stiller’s new film “Brad’s Status,” the actor said, is how many of us spend “way too much time worrying about being less successful than our peer group.
“You can be happily driving down the street or something, and if you’re an actor — especially in Hollywood where they have those huge billboards up on Sunset Boulevard — you can be easily hit in the face with a huge one- upmanship comparison. You look up and see that huge billboard for someone’s latest film, and think, ‘ What?! What’s that?! How did he get that? Nobody told me about that!’ ”
However, as Stiller sees it, those kinds of things are less prevalent “in Chicago or other parts of the Midwest that I’ve been to. I’m sure ‘ keeping up with the Joneses’ is going on in Chicago and in your area, but based on my own professional experiences — or even just privately — whenever I come to Chicago I don’t hear people expressing the kind of jealous emotions that I do see so often in L. A. or New York.”
In “Brad’s Status,” Stiller plays the title character, a guy who is happily married and living in Sacramento with his wife ( played by Jenna Fischer) and their only child Troy ( Austin Abrams) a brilliant high school senior who is also a talented musician. Brad runs a tiny not- for- profit foundation, but he’s unhappy because — in his mind — his college pals all have become wildly famous, extremely wealthy and far more successful than he.
Fischer’s character is very satisfied both with her marriage and career as a government civil servant. As for the theme of status comparisons, the actress said she felt writer- director Mike White’s point was to “dissect the anxiety that we have over getting those ‘ likes’ on social media, or discovering where are we in comparison to others. It’s all about how we compare and contrast our lives with other people’s lives — and he brilliantly focuses on our idea of other people’s lives and how they are doing.”