One of Heather Graham‘s career-defining roles was as Rollergirl in the 1997 movie, Boogie Nights, but the character came with its challenges, including a nude scene. It was something she had tried to avoid early on in her career, but she eventually had a change of heart.
“I grew up in a religious family, and they were like, ‘Don’t do anything with any sexual content,’” Graham said on the Oct. 8 episode of Inside of You With Michael Rosenbaum podcast “But try to be a woman in Hollywood in your early 20s, mid-20s, and then to try to get no roles with any sexual content — it’s like impossible.” The now-54-year-old actress watched her peers “having really good careers” while embracing films with “sexual content.”
“I just said, ‘Screw it. I wanna do this. The [Boogie Nights] script is amazing,'” Graham admitted. The Rollergirl role was hers after Gwyneth Paltrow turned down the project, per her 2015 interview with Howard Stern. “My grandfather, I was very, very close to him. And he was, you know, pretty conservative — and I just thought, I can’t be totally naked, and like, giving a BJ on screen,” Paltrow told Stern, via UpRoxx. “Like, I’ll kill my grandfather! So, yeah, I didn’t do it.”
Even though the character brought Graham much acclaim in Hollywood, filming a nude scene that involved oral sex was “terrifying” for her. “As a woman, I have to say, even if you go, ‘OK. Well, maybe I know sometimes men find me attractive,’ you look at all the flaws. You go, ‘Oh my god. They’re gonna see these flaws.’ I remember just sitting in my trailer, like, being like, ‘Oh my God. I’m so scared,'” she added. Despite her nervousness, Graham looks back on the film fondly, describing it as “fun.”
Graham has no regrets about her full-frontal moment in Boogie Nights and looks back fondly on the movie, as she told Flow Space in September. “That was a wonderful movie to work on, to get to work with Paul Thomas Anderson and all those great actors who, pretty much all of them, went on to do just amazing things,” she said. “And it was a really great creative moment in my life.”
“This was a moment where I decided to play a sexual role, and it really helped my career so much,” she explained. “So, it’s kind of strange, because in some ways, I did feel like people started to see me as that character. But, you know, I was having a hard time getting jobs, so at this point, I was just excited to be [working].”
Before you go, click here to see actors who have spoken out about pressure to get naked for a role.
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