Was working Pearl Harbor for director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer just testosterone overload?
It was actually not a bad experience other than the fact that I felt that I was hideous all the time. I got quite insecure because I got told a lot that I wasn’t pretty enough. I was very pale and I wasn’t a gym bunny so I think they were very concerned. It’s normal for them, on such a big movie, to want to make you the best looking that you could be. Yet, I think it just wasn’t handled in the most sensitive way. Would they pull down a pie chart and say, “These are the problem areas here”? (Laughs) I did feel there was a sort of catalog of failings. You’d be in a conversation about something else and someone would suddenly go, “You have kind of funny teeth.” But I wasn’t singled out. It happened to everybody. Ben Affleck, who’d done Armageddon, was very open about, “This is what goes on,” and I really needed somebody to tell me it wasn’t just me. Did it toughen you up? It didn’t toughen me up at all. It freaked me out because I was so pleased with myself because I had lost the 70 pound
