Burning bright
Katherine Heigl lights up ‘Firefly Lane,’ but she’s done apologizing
The Secret” changed Katherine Heigl’s life. Well, rather, the script for the movie that Heigl didn’t actually end up starring in changed her life. “I had always kind of pooh-poohed it,” she said. “And then I read the script about six or seven years ago, and there was something “about it that resonated with me — this idea that we sort of bring about what we think most about.”
Reading “The Secret” led to other books on manifestation, intention work, mysticism, crystals and witchcraft.
“It’s gone in many different directions,” said Heigl, who was raised in the Mormon faith. “But what it’s mostly helped me discover is, I’m in control. I just feel happier than I did at 35, at 25.”
Time has been on the 42-year-old’s mind lately. Her new series, “Firefly Lane,” premieres Wednesday on Netflix and has Heigl playing fictional talk show host Tully Hart in her 40s and — through the magic of CGI and soft lighting — her early 20s. “There’s no way I’m pulling off 20 and 22, OK?”
Based on the book by Kristin Hannah, “Firefly Lane” dives beyond the superficial as it follows Tully and her best friend, Kate (played by “Scrubs” star Sarah Chalke), through the decades, charting the trials and tribulations that such longevity brings. It’s a comforting escape of a show, centered on female friendship in all its messy glory.
“Any relationship that has stood the test of that kind of time is going to have moments of fallout, and if it doesn’t, that means somebody is not being honest,” Heigl said. “Somebody is not being allowed to grow, and somebody is not creating boundaries.”
The way Heigl discusses the relationship between Tully and Kate — a bond that includes fights, periods of not speaking to each other and betrayal — could also describe Heigl’s tumultuous relationship with Hollywood itself.
Yes, she did brand her 2007 Judd Apatow comedy “Knocked Up” “a little sexist” and lamented that it painted women as uptight “shrews.” Yes, one year after winning an Emmy for her role as Izzie Stevens on “Grey’s Anatomy,” Heigl asked to have her name withdrawn from 2008 awards consideration
because she “did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination.” And, yes, she complained about working a 17-hour day on “Grey’s” in 2009, when her own schedule was possibly to blame. It was a spate of comments and actions that many decided collectively painted a picture of the worst kind of woman: a difficult one.
“At the time, I was just quickly told to shut the [expletive] up. The more I said I was sorry, the more they wanted it,” she said. “The more terrified and scared I was of doing something wrong, the more I came across like I had really done something horribly wrong.
“I may have said a couple of things you didn’t like, but then that escalated to ‘she’s ungrateful,’ then that escalated to ‘she’s difficult,’ and that escalated to ‘she’s unprofessional,’” she said.
“What is your definition of difficult? Somebody with an opinion that you don’t like? Now, I’m 42, and that [expletive] pisses me off.”
The only time Heigl issued an apology during this interview was for her periodic swearing, admitting, “I haven’t yet addressed that particular issue.”
Tucked inside a small room at her sprawling Utah ranch for a video interview, Heigl radiates warmth. Her whole body shakes with laughter or rocks with an emphatic nod at a particularly groan-worthy memory. She’s the first to bring up some of the less savory headlines that have plagued her career and doesn’t shy away from answering whatever questions are lobbed at her, pausing occasionally to sip from a thermos before delivering a new zinger.
As the years have passed and the world has changed, there seems to be a growing realization that maybe, just maybe, the Heigl backlash outweighed the crime. In a post-#MeToo world, in a post-Trump world, is it not laughable that so much grief was given to a woman for speaking her mind?
“She has very strong convictions and strong opinions on certain things, and she doesn’t back down from letting you know if she feels like she’s been wronged in any way,” said James Marsden, her “27 Dresses” co-star and friend.
“I’ve always seen that as just strength of character. I can see how that can get construed as being difficult or ungrateful or whatever. But if you know Katie, it’s simply because she has the courage to stand behind something she believes.”
If Heigl’s transgressions happened now, it’s hard to imagine the public reaction playing out in quite the same way.
“If she said [some of it] today, she’d be a hero,” said her husband of 13 years, singer Josh Kelley.
During the “shunning,” as Heigl referred to that onslaught of backlash in the late aughts, the anxiety she had
struggled with since her teenage years began to spiral. She married Kelley in December 2007, and they adopted their daughter, Naleigh, from South Korea in 2009, increasingly spending time at the ranch they built together near Park City, Utah. But as the public narrative continued to spin out, Heigl couldn’t escape her thoughts.
“I think my family, my mother, my husband, my friends were scared. And I regret deeply that I scared them like that. But I just couldn’t control it. I had no tools,” she said, adding that mental health issues were rarely discussed in her family.
Kelley remembers being “very worried” despite Heigl’s thick skin and outwardly confident persona.
“I can’t imagine what all of that pressure did to her over the years, dealing with celebrity, dealing with people saying things about her that are not true,” he said. “It would be hard for anybody to process that, especially when it’s unjust and a lot of it’s negative.”
In 2015, the year before she became pregnant with their son, Joshua Jr., Heigl’s anxiety spiked again, but it wasn’t until another flare-up a year after his birth that she began regularly seeing a therapist, got diagnosed and put on medication.
“I asked my mom and my husband to find me somewhere to go that could help me because I felt like I would rather be dead,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much anxiety I was living with until I got so bad that I had to really seek help. You can do a lot of inner soul work, but I’m a big fan of Zoloft.”
She’s helped maintain her balance by staying firmly rooted in Utah except when she’s filming. It’s where she
and Kelley have chosen to raise their children: Naleigh, 12; Adalaide, 8, adopted in 2012; and Joshua Jr., 4.
But the family’s countryside serenity was shattered following the death of George Floyd in May. As America grappled with a racial reckoning, Heigl shared a series of lengthy Instagram posts expressing her “sorrow” and “rage” at the police officers involved and wondering how she would be able to “explain the unexplainable” to her daughter Adalaide, who is Black.
“There is not a ton of diversity in Utah, and that was not something we even thought of because we were living in our white bubble and just kind of thinking, ‘Love is love,’” Heigl said. “It was a very big eye-opener. I took to seeking advice and counsel from those who are more steeped in this experience and staying up at night trying to figure out how the hell do I have this conversation with my kids?”
Here, Heigl became choked up. “I know every mother of a child who has to have this conversation must feel the same, and they’re probably, like, ‘Suck it up, Heigl. This is what has to be done.’ But it feels like taking a piece of their soul.”
Heigl is slated to star in and executive produce a limited series about Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. president in 1872, and she also serves as an executive producer on “Firefly Lane.”
“I spent a lot of years just being the actor hired,” Heigl said. “I feel now I have enough experience and enough wisdom to have a voice, to collaborate about character, about story, about cast. It’s about having a seat at the table.”