At the LA press day for Easy Virtue Biel had nothing but praise for her fellow cast members and praise for the incredible period costumes she was given to wear in this adaptation of Noel Coward's play.
Jessica Biel Easy Virtue Press Conference
There's that quote: "The past is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Do you sometimes think when you're doing a period piece like this that it might not have been too bad back then?Jessica Biel: "Yes, definitely. When you're living it for two months, kind of on and off, it's fabulous. You want to live there. You want to dress in beautiful, glamorous and incredible clothes and actually get dressed in the morning to do anything, have beautiful parties and it just seems so fun and frivolous. But life was clearly very difficult, living back then. So, yes, it's fun, but I much prefer to live now. There were so many restrictions, especially for women of course. It was so difficult to do what you wanted and have a career. You couldn't really do that, very easily at least."
How did you relate to your character, Larita, and what did you have to pull out of yourself for her that wasn't very like you?
Jessica Biel: "I related to her in the kind of fish out of water feel. I think I've always sort of felt that way growing up, just in general. I went a lot of different schools. I was always the new kid. You're on television and then you go to the college. Then you're the kid who's on television at college and everyone knows you and you don't know anybody. So I really connect with her kind of stoic 'I'm going to survive in this situation' attitude. What was very different for me to grasp was her incredible comebacks and her wit and cleverness. I wish I was like that. I'm just a little too nice. It's so boring. I want to be more like her, in that sense."
Can you talk about going to England and shooting there? Did you feel like a fish out of water doing that? And also taking Noel Coward, which is so British, and working with all of these British stars – were you intimidated at all by that?
Jessica Biel: "Definitely. Definitely intimidated by that. I wasn't that familiar with Noel Coward to begin with. I was more familiar with his music, actually, than his actual plays. I terribly look up to Kristin Scott Thomas and love Colin Firth. Everyone there had been through such intense drama school. Initially I just kind of felt like I didn't fit in and like, 'Gosh. I hope I'm good enough to pull this off.' So it was scary. It is nerve-wracking going to live in a new place and in a different country. Thank goodness I speak the language. That makes it a lot easier, let me tell you."
But you could use that, right?
Jessica Biel: "Yeah, absolutely. You do feel like the outsider. You can't help it. You're the American. You don't know what a crumpet is. You're sticking out like a sore thumb, but it's kind of invigorating and it's kind of wonderful and it's good to get out of your comfort zone. I like that. I like to do that, get out of my comfort zone and experience some other things."
Can you talk about doing the song for this film? Did you know about doing that before the project or coming onto the project?
Jessica Biel: "That happened in the middle of shooting. Ben [Barnes] was singing, doing something in a scene and Steph [Elliott] said, 'God, you have such a great voice. You should sing the lead track. We want to do 'Mad About the Boy' and you should sing it.' So they were actually moving forward with Ben singing it and what they found out, looking into Noel Coward's will and the things that he wrote about for his particular music was that he said no man could ever record that song again. I guess that he was in love with somebody and that was it. No man was going to record that again. So you can only find women singing it and recording. Then he heard me humming around or something and then he said, 'Now, you should do it.' So it was really very random and I hadn't planned on it, and it was just such a treat to get to do that."
"I know that nobody knows this about me, but I really started in music with musical theater and Annie and The Sound of Music. I wanted to be Whitney Houston. That was my dream. I don't know how it took a left turn. I don't know what happened. I just sort of got into this acting world, but it was really fun for me to go back and do that."
Ben Barnes brought you flowers when you first arrived in England. Can you talk about that?
Jessica Biel: "He's so great. He's such a nice guy and is just involved in the process and cares so much about it. I think he's pretty new at this moment, or at that moment that he was working with us. I think he had just done his first Narnia and had probably spent a lot of time in front of a green screen. So he was itching to just work with his people and get his hands dirty and have a really good time. It was just a ball."
You look like you were born to wear the clothes from this period. Did you feel that way while shooting this and did you adopt any of that style, personally?
Jessica Biel: "I definitely did feel pretty wonderful in those clothes everyday, but the thing about those clothes is that they're built for women's bodies. They're built to accentuate your waste and give you room in the hips and the legs and let you wear just a loose and beautiful silk, satin blouse. Everyone will feel beautiful in something like that. It was just such a wonderful time for women's clothing, I think, that suited a woman's body."
