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ME Exclusives
Raymond Beauchemin
Movie Entertainment
February 2010
Before filming for Easy Virtue even began, Jessica Biel was marked as the movie’s one to watch.
During an interview with Movie Entertainment to promote the movie, Biel sat with director and co-writer Stephen Elliott and made an admission: “I hate read-throughs. They’re terrifying … They’re un comfortable. They’re the worst.” But according to Elliott, she really needn’t have worried.
With no rehearsal time for the film, the cast and crew for Easy Virtue were limited to a get-to-know-you, get-to-know-the-script ritual called the cast read-through. Elliott recounted how Biel’s performance was subdued in comparison to that of the other actors, but that Colin Firth, who plays Mr. Whittaker in the film, saw through her quiet performance and said, “She’ll steal the picture.” Elliott continued: “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘The one who gives nothing away in the read-through is the one you gotta watch.’ She didn’t give anything up, and it was true.”
Firth and Elliott were not the only ones to recognize Biel’s star turn in the movie. When Easy Virtue opened, the Hollywood Reporter said Biel played “a kind, witty, supremely intelligent and beautiful woman who … is capable of rejoinders that thoroughly undercut her opponent’s withering criticism.”
In Easy Virtue, which airs on TMN and Movie Central this month, Biel plays Larita Whittaker, an American widow with a secret past who impulsively marries the British scion to a failing estate while in France after the First World War. When John Whittaker (Ben Barnes, Prince Caspian in the Chronicles of Narnia series) takes Larita home, she meets with instant disapproval from his mother, played by Kristin Scott-Thomas, who, as in so much of English literature from Austen on down, thinks only of position, property and power. John Whittaker’s father, played by Firth, and Larita are instant allies, adding to the narrative tension.
Though Easy Virtue is based on a Noel Coward play and set in the 1920s, Elliott purposely did not create a “period” piece, a genre he finds soporific. Not that it would have mattered to Biel, who, after a short career of playing contemporary characters, broke out as a leading actor in a period piece, The Illusionist, with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti in2006. It won her several minor awards for her role as an early 20th century duchess, including the Rising Star Award from the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Newport Beach Film Festival’s achievement award.
Like many young actors, Biel began in hometown stage productions. For her, that meant Annie and The Sound of Music in Ely, Minn., where she was born in 1982. Her early training included singing, which came in handy during Easy Virtue because all the actors contributed to the jazz-era soundtrack. She also sang in the role of Salvation Army member Sarah Brown in the musical Guys and Dolls last August at the Hollywood Bowl.
Biel’s first role of significance was as the oldest daughter of a preacher in the WB television series 7th Heaven. She caused a bit of controversy at the end of the series’ fourth season, when, hoping to get less-vanilla roles, she tried and failed to get a part in American Beauty. Hoping to find a way to get out of her contract with Warner Bros., she posed semi-nude for Gear magazine. It didn’t help that she was underage at the time.
“Being 16 was so hard. You’re changing physically; you’re searching for who you’re going to be as a woman,” she told FoxNews.com. “You’re fighting with this feeling of overconfidence, but there is so much insecurity. … I was going through it, definitely pushing the envelope with authority and my parents. I was scared to grow up, but at the same time I just wanted to grow up.”
Though she says she regrets the Gear shoot, it probably accomplished what she had intended. She played 7th Heaven to the contractual end of the fifth year and made the jump to full-time movie acting – in less squeaky-clean roles: Freddie Prinze Jr.’s love interest in Summer Catch, and an uninhibited coed in The Rules of Attraction.
Her first lead role was in Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Success at the box office led to other big roles in such films as Blade: Trinity and Stealth, but she continued to do cameos and smaller roles in important or independent films, including Elizabethtown, London, and the well-received but commercial failure Home of the Brave, in which she played an Iraq war veteran struggling to adjust to her return to the United States.
Drama, sci-fi, thriller, comedy, bitchy historical period piece and, with the release of Planet 51 last November, animation: “I love the escapism of movies, to disappear into a film, whether it’s animated or a horror movie, or a love story, whatever it is. I love to just disappear and get into somebody else’s life,” she told Movie Entertainment.
Her next disappearing act will be in The A-Team, an update of the 1980s television series which is being shot in Vancouver. In it Biel plays Lt. Sosa, who, like her fellow team members, is an Iraq war veteran fighting injustice. The role didn’t require so many Noel Coward witticisms, but she did have to learn how to shoot an M4 machine gun.
What Biel didn’t have to learn was the principle of justice. In 2007 she, her father, Jonathan, and a business partner established the Make the Difference Network, a kind of charity-business matchmaker that connects charities and non-profit organizations in need of funding with businesses that wish to donate. Dropping a coin into someone’s hand might seem an easy virtue. Going the extra mile and setting up an internationally recognized social-charitable network has put Biel on the A-Team.
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