Jessica Simpson didn't
play the ditz. I don't know if that's because she's matured or decided she can
afford to drop the act, or if MTV selectively edited her reality show, or—and
this is what I fear—she just didn't find me attractive enough to bother. I'd
wanted anachronisms and misused homonyms and bizarrely literal interpretations,
and I got nothing. I felt like an Ace Ventura fan who'd bought a ticket
to The Truman Show.
“I've gone through life playing a character. It's my flirtatious way,”
Simpson says, drinking the first of three glasses of pinot grigio at Los
Angeles' Chateau Marmont after a day of being followed, yet again, by paparazzi.
“I'd say things to make people's heads turn. And I discovered I'd rather make
people's heads turn than make their eyebrows raise.” It seems that she had
this self-realization while playing Daisy Duke in the film adaptation of The
Dukes of Hazzard. Simpson, 25, says the three-month shoot in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, was her version of college—the first time she'd been separated for
more than a day or two from her dad, her mom, and her husband, Nick Lachey, whom
she started dating when she was 18 and married when she was 22. There are Amish
women used to more independence than Jessica Simpson.
The time away from Lachey fed a tabloid frenzy about the state of the Newlyweds'
marriage, but Simpson brushes off the rumors, saying she used the time not only
to take a lot of bubble baths but also to educate herself in the things her
religious upbringing had shielded her from, which is basically everything
besides Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Though she sometimes reads the Bible
with friends, she no longer goes to church regularly. “I grew up in a Southern
Baptist bubble. Me and my family got out of that and came to L.A. To see all
forms of meditation and prayer,” she says, “made me less judgmental.”
The Dukes of Hazzard is the most radical step in the secularization of
Simpson's career, which began on the Christian music circuit when she was 14.
After telling the press that she wanted to play the ass-kicking,
clothing-allergic Daisy Duke, she beat out 30 other women, including Britney
Spears, for the role. This must have felt nicely vengeful, given that Spears not
only bested Simpson on the pop charts in the late '90s but also had beaten her
out for a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club in the early '90s. The Daisy
role, Simpson figured, was small enough that she didn't have to carry the film
and close enough to her persona that she could pull it off. “Daisy Duke is a
lot of who I am,” she says. “I don't want people walking out of a movie
thinking I was trying to act or be some movie star. I want them to think, That
might make me like Jessica a little bit more.” This isn't just a business
strategy. Jessica Simpson, more than anything, wants to be liked.
And it seems to be working. People who have seen screenings say she's the most
memorable thing about the film. Certainly, this has a lot to do with how hot she
looks. The 5'31?2" blond with the cute bump on her nose looks pretty
amazing here in the hotel, quaffing wines in her everyday four-inch Marni heels,
giant silver hoop earrings, vintage brown belt, and black Rachel Palley skirt
that she's somehow also turned into a halter top (“I'm like MacGyver when it
comes to scarves and accessories,” she says), which she wears braless in a
manner so spectacular that she feels compelled to tell me that her breasts are
real. It is an awkward moment for both of us.
In the movie she's somehow even better looking. “When you put her on screen
she glows,” says Jay Chandrasekhar, directing his second major feature
following Club Dread and stints in TV, notably on Arrested Development.
“I remember looking at the monitor and then putting my head outside the
monitor and thinking, This woman has a halo around her. For whatever reason, she
looks f--king great on film.”
She worked hard to look great, going on a strict protein-vegetable-Splenda diet
(she even puts the sweetener on sweet potatoes), hitting the gym, and spending a
lot of time in wardrobe before finding the perfect pair of Lucky jeans to chop
into Daisy Dukes. “I tried on a hundred pairs of jeans to find out what looks
good on my ass,” Simpson says. “Daisy Duke was known for her ass, so I had
to do her justice.” It's like method acting, only for her ass. I can't wait
for the James Lipton interview.
Secondary to looking hot, it turns out Simpson is surprisingly natural for
someone who has never acted. Coach Larry Moss left after the first day on set,
saying that she didn't need his help. “He gave us our money back and split,”
says Dukes producer Bill Gerber. “That doesn't happen in movies.”
In her first attempt at
acting, for a sitcom about a TV reporter that didn't make the 2004 fall ABC
schedule, she was the strongest performer at the rehearsal; the more seasoned
actors froze up around the huge group of Simpson-curious execs in the room. “I
think she is a genetic celebrity,” says Gayle Abrams, who wrote and
executive-produced the pilot. “The first time she ever read the script out
loud, she was great.” She was so relaxed on shoot night that she walked into
the audience and sang as part of the warm-up. Abrams theorizes that ABC passed
on the show because of Simpson's fame. “She's got such a strong public
persona, the fear was that people might not believe her as anyone other than
herself. If she has an obstacle as an actress, that's what it is.”
Realizing this, Simpson plans to stick to characters who aren't too far from
ditzy blond. She's currently attached to a project called Major Movie Star,
about an actress who gets loaded after blowing an audition and drunkenly joins
the army. The idea to act came, like all of her professional decisions, from Joe
Simpson, her father and manager. An ordained Baptist minister who now sports an
earring, he shows up in the lobby of Chateau Marmont at the end of the
interview. He says he had no doubt Jessica would be able to pull off the part.
“She's been acting since she was five: She's been acting stupid. She learned
at a very young age about dumb blonds.” He compares her to Julia Roberts,
Lucille Ball, and most of all to Barbra Streisand. “I've told her since she
was a little girl that she could be Barbra Streisand,” he says. “I've always
loved Barbra Streisand. She is [self]-effacing. She has wonderful comedic
timing.” Acting, he says, has always been part of his career strategy for his
daughter. “Acting was always my love,” he volunteers. “I wanted to be an
actor since I was seven.”
So perhaps this wasn't Jessica's dream, but after her father planted the idea in
her young head she got excited about it. “I wanted to see myself on the big
screen. Who wouldn't?” she says. What she discovered was that “you can rest
in the character you're playing. To go inside someone else's being and escape
for a while is so relaxing. It's like taking a break off of being the focus.”
Yet she was so nervous about her first day on the set of Dukes that that
night she wrote thank-you notes to her director and costars Johnny Knoxville,
Seann William Scott, Burt Reynolds, and Willie Nelson. “It was so polite and
so sweet,” Chandrasekhar says. “You're getting a little note from Jessica
Simpson with a little heart on the envelope. It's extremely effective. She knows
what she's doing. This girl is a mogul.”
She's already got a line of edible bath and beauty products called Dessert and
is coming out with a line of clothes called Princy (short for “princess,”
which she says she is) by Jessica Simpson that will be sold at department
stores. And she wants to open a barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles where she can
introduce her recipe for chili and corn bread casserole. “But it won't have to
be under my name,” she demurs. “I just want people in L.A. to have good
barbecue.”
Joe Simpson jumps in to explain that he's already talked to chef Todd English of
Olives about setting up a chain of barbecue joints with performance spaces that
would be used by local bands on the weekends and for karaoke on
weekdays—using, no doubt, some kind of branded karaoke machine called the
Jessicizer.
The singing arm of the Jessica Simpson brand is now the shakiest component of
her fame. She started recording her upcoming album right after she wrapped Dukes;
she says her epiphany on the film's set made her sing differently than she had
on the first three records. “I always felt I had to show off. I had to sing in
the rafters, to try to be Mariah, try to be Christina. But Etta James is just so
honest,” she says. Her favorite book of the Bible, Psalms, reminds her to sing
from her soul, and not for fame. “I know when I sing to make a hit and when
I'm singing from my heart,” she says. Her biggest hit, “With You,” is one
of her favorite songs, but she says she wasn't singing for the love of singing
and the song doesn't sound the way she'd like it to.
So on the upcoming album, which includes a duet with her new friend Willie
Nelson, she's not as worried about radio play as being the laid-back chanteuse,
making head mike-free tunes. It's okay with her if she still doesn't sell as
much as Britney or Christina or whoever wins the next American Idol—a
show she detests, saying it kills people's fantasies. CD sales, she explains,
don't bring in much money. Nor did Newlyweds. Touring brings in some.
“But you don't make as much money as you do in endorsements and just in fame
alone,” she says.
The fame has had its downside lately, as the tabloids predict the end of her
marriage on their covers either because her husband is cavorting with strippers
or because she's being courted by Johnny Knoxville or Fred Durst. “It rolls
off me now,” she says of the rumors, which she insists are untrue. Her
marriage, if her finger is any indication, is in awesome shape. In addition to a
giant engagement ring, she wears three wedding rings: her own diamond-studded
one, a ring she picked up in Mexico recently, and her grandmother's thin, worn,
gold engagement band. “It puts marriages in perspective,” she says of the
last one. “It's not about the glitz and the glamour and what you can buy.”
She's in no hurry to have children but plans to adopt, as she actually tried to
do at age 16 after visiting an orphanage in Mexico with her church group.
“That's what I wanted for my birthday,” she says. “But I couldn't legally
get a baby across the Mexican border.” For her next ABC variety show with her
husband—following last spring's Nick & Jessica's Tour of Duty (her
dad thought she could be Bob Hope in Iraq)—she's hoping to visit an orphanage.
Despite her married-lady status and adoption talk, Simpson is excited about her
own growing up, which at age 25 is finally being permitted to happen. She's got
that freshman year of college excitement about everything she encounters. “I'm
in this whole world of discovery; every day is fun for me,” she says. She's
listening to Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday and even samples Benny Goodman on
her new album. She is also writing in her journal for an hour a day, something
she stopped doing when she got married. She has found that despite her confusion
over the canned tuna, she actually does like fish. She bought a bunch of Chuck
Palahniuk books. She even became the only person in America to love the new
Woody Allen movie, Melinda and Melinda. Apparently that can happen if
you've never seen a Woody Allen movie. A Jessica Simpson who knows stuff will be
even more of a threat, if perhaps less entertaining. MTV stopped rolling at just
the right moment.
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