“The Ugly Truth,” a sweetly outrageous take on the battle of the sexes, marks Katherine Heigl’s second R-rated summer comedy.“It’s not that I want to do R-rated movies, but they’re the most honest out there. I’m a 30-year-old woman,” the star of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy” and the 2007 summer smash “Knocked Up” said Friday at L.A.’s Four Seasons Hotel.
“I loved ‘27 Dresses’ ” - her 2008 PG-13 hit - “but I still feel like I want to tell a real story to people my age and my generation. We censor so much of that (raunchy language) for a PG-13 rating that it can start to get a little cute and a little fantasy.”
In “Ugly Truth” Heigl plays Abby, a single California TV talk show producer who has yet to meet her ideal guy.
When Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler) starts making commentaries on her show about what men really think of women, namely their looks - “the ugly truth” as he calls it - it sparks a ratings bonanza.
Though Abby is initially disgusted, the two feel an attraction.
“What I love,” Heigl said, “is they end up together but it didn’t feel like fantasy, it felt like real life - two people sexually attracted to each other who came together emotionally and came together in a grownup’s world.”
Abby is not far from her “Grey’s Anatomy” character Dr. Izzie Stevens. Abby, she said, “Is not Izzie but a distant cousin.”
“I definitely want to go and explore different personalities and people. But at the end of the day it’s hard to divorce me from that role. It’s nine months of the year, five days a week. It’s the way I talk and gesture; I’m going to slip in there. For this film I thought I could escape but I couldn’t. Something of me is always going to surface.”
There have been rumors that Heigl was leaving the series, but she returned and filmed 17 hours last Wednesday.
