Katherine Heigl Regrets Slamming Knocked Up, Says It Was “Dumb”

The mea culpas have finally arrived in full. Katherine Heigl is admitting she may have made a mistake eight years ago when she slammed Knocked Up for being sexist after the movie's release. Heigl, who starred in the 2007 film alongside Seth Rogen, admitted on The Howard Stern Show this week that it was "dumb" to criticize the project. "I liked the movie a lot. I just didn't like me, " the 37-year-old actress said on air. "She was kind of like, she was so judgmental and kind of uptight and controlling and all these things," Heigl explained, referring to her character. "I really went with it while we were doing it, and a lot of it, Judd allows everyone to be very free and improvise and whatever and afterwards, I was like, 'Why is that where I went with this? What an asshole she is!'" After the film hit theaters, Heigl gave an interview in Vanity Fair panning the movie. "It was a little sexist," she told the mag at the time. "It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I'm playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you're portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie." Heigl has had plenty of time to think back on why she went down that path in the press. "It was, again, one of those situations, it was a huge opportunity for me. I was being interviewed for Vanity Fair. Like, I was on the cover of Vanity Fair, it was a huge big deal for me," she told Stern. "And the journalist...just said, 'You know a lot of women felt it was a little sexist,' so then I felt obligated to answer that and so I tried in my very sort of ungracious way to answer why I felt that it maybe was a little." The Knocked Up controversy wasn't the only one the actress discussed with Stern. She also delved into why — during that same year — she removed her own name from the Emmy consideration pool for her portrayal of Izzie Stevens on Grey's Anatomy. At the time, she said she felt she wasn't "given the material to warrant a nomination." "I didn't feel good about my performance," Heigl explained to Stern. "There was a part of me that thought, because I had won the year before, that I needed juicy, dramatic, emotional material and I just didn't have that that season." The actress also reflected on seeking out Shonda Rhimes to apologize after the fact. "I went in to Shonda and said, 'I'm so sorry. That wasn't cool. I should not have said that,'" she recalled. "I shouldn't have said anything publicly, but at the time, I didn't think anybody would notice. I didn't know that journalists would see who submitted and who didn't. I just quietly didn't submit, and then it became a story and then I felt I was obligated to make my statement and 'shut up, Katie.'" Listen to a clip from the interview, below.