LOS ANGELES -- As ambivalent as she's often seemed about the show that made her famous, the only sign of rebellion we see in Katherine Heigl is that she's dyed her famously blond hair dark.
In fact, even as her quest continues for the title of queen of romantic-comedy -- she's in deep promotion mode for The Ugly Truth, an "adult" comedy that pairs her with Gerard Butler -- Heigl admits she'll always be Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Izzie Stevens.
"I definitely want to go out and explore different personalities," she says. "But I used to have this conversation with the other actors. It's really hard to divorce me completely from the role. It's nine months a year, it's every day, sometimes it's 80-hour weeks, the way I talk, the way I walk, the way I gesture. It's going to slip in there.
"I thought for film, I maybe could, but I can't. Some of me is always going to show up in these roles. So yeah, Izzie.
"That's why I coloured my hair, because that will fool everybody," she says, facetiously.
Still, there are parts of the 'real' Katherine Heigl that can never be expressed on network TV.
Hence, The Ugly Truth -- a war-between-the-sexes romp highlighted by a When Harry Met Sally-type orgasm scene involving a pair of remote-controlled vibrating panties.
"I love raunchy humour," says Heigl, who scandalized network censors when she yelled "Sh--!" when her name was announced as an Emmy winner.
"I don't know why. Maybe I should just be a little more sophisticated. But I just think it's hilarious. I'm not terribly precious about that sort of stuff."
In a role that evokes her breakthrough film role in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (as opposed to her PG followup 27 Dresses), The Ugly Truth casts Heigl as Abby, the executive producer of a chirpy morning show in Sacramento, Calif.
Her lukewarm TV career is turned upside down when the station owner hires a crass sex-expert named Mike Chadway (Butler) as its "no BS" relationship expert, a give-'em-sex adviser whose ratings stunts include hiring models to wrestle in vats of Jello.
Initially repulsed by him, she nonetheless takes his advice on men to land a handsome doctor (Eric Winter), only to realize that the clean-cut "Mr. Right" doesn't do it for her as much as the "bad boy" Chadway, who gives battery-powered underwear as gifts.
The scene at a restaurant, in which the remote falls into the hands of a bored little boy, required 35 different takes from different angles.
"Oh, I'm very method," Heigl says with a laugh. "But it was physically exhausting, so much physical movement, tensing of the body. By the end of the day, I felt like I'd run a marathon. Now I know why it's called physical comedy. But really, nobody wants to orgasm 35 times."
(Says Butler: "I've got to tell you, no matter how well this movie does, that scene is going to go down in the annals of history in comedies. It's one of the most brilliant performances I've ever seen. She was so, dare I say, bang on?")
It hardly needs saying that the movie is getting adult ratings (R in the U.S.).
"I have a really strong opinion about that," Heigl says. "I feel like I'm a 30-year-old woman, and as much as I love those younger audiences, and those kind of movies, and I loved 27 Dresses, I still feel like I want to tell a real story to people my age. And we throw f--- around a lot. The thing I love about this movie is they do end up together.
"Who knows if they end up happily ever after. But it didn't feel like fantasy. It felt like real life, like two people who were sexually attracted to each other, and then emotionally.
"It's not that I always want to do R-rated movies, or that they are the most honest movies out there. But there's something about the ability to be crass, the ability to drop the F-bomb on occasion, the ability to say c---. That, you know, felt real to me, like the world I live in with my friends."
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