As a new mom to adopted daughter Naleigh, Katherine Heigl could relate to her latest project, “Life As We Know It.” In the new film, Heigl and co-star Josh Duhamel are thrust into parenthood when their best friends die and leave them custody of their infant daughter.
“I loved the movie and related to the movie because in my own life I was getting ready to become a mom, and wanting to start a family, but I didn’t expect to be doing both at the same time, so it was interesting and overwhelming for sure,” she admits.
Her new life didn’t, however, leave a whole lot of time for prepping for her role. “I couldn’t show up to set with the same kind of focus I had in the past on other projects because I was really distracted,” Heigl says. “So what you see in my performance is pretty much who I was at that time and all I had. I gave it all I got, but there wasn’t a lot of craft involved at that point. It was just instinct. It was a fascinating psych experiment.”
Another experiment was working with the triplets who took turns playing her on-screen daughter. “It’s hard. It’s like, being around children, they’re unpredictable,” she says.
“They’re not trained monkeys. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. So a lot of it was just having to kind of go with the flow and maybe have to rewrite the script while we’re sitting there — saying, ‘In this scene she’s going to be crying instead of laughing.’”
