this year) or letting the paparazzi affect
her by "having great people in my life -- great friends, great
family."
"Anything in life has a ying and yang," Swank says.
"There is the double-edged sword in everything, but I don't
understand the whole culture or the fascination with celebrity."
Swank, 32, has come a long way since her less lofty days in The
Next Karate Kid or TV's Beverly Hills 90210. "I never
knocked a job and I took any job I could get, especially in the beginning
and I was never a snob about it," she recalls.
But when she talks about her Oscars (for Boys Don't Cry and Million
Dollar Baby) she still maintains a down-to-earth approach to her own
extraordinary success. "In an interesting way, I never went into this
business for the acclaim of it or the dressing up part," Swank says.
"I love  people
and stories, so all that is a side-effect that happened and still blows my
mind. Seriously, I walk by and I see them [her Oscars], and I think I am
in the wrong house."
Those earlier choices were justified, as now Swank is one of
Hollywood's elite, picking and choosing what she does. "I wake up
every day, go to work and I am really grateful," she says.
Such is the case, she says with The Reaping, a contemporary
take on the Old Testament's 10 plagues directed by Stephen Hopkins and
co-starring David Morrissey and AnnaSophia Robb.
"It was a real page-turner for me," she says. "There
is something that happens in this movie that I didn't see coming, and let
me just say, I see things coming a million miles away."
Swank is a fan of smart horror films, this film being one of them.
"The idea in this movie that this could really happen is what's
scary," she adds. "It is not the whole 'wielding a knife through
a forest'
that
are harder movies for me to
go see, but there are dramatic qualities to this movie --
religious qualities and a lot of analogies to life, too. It seems
you can't judge something by first glance, all that's kind of
wrapped up into it."
Although Swank could identify with her character, she adds
it's not really necessary. "I think that the idea of having
such a strong belief and then having something shake you so
profoundly that you lose that belief, and then regain it later, is
powerful, and that is what life's about."
- Tom E. Rona |
THE
10 PLAGUES WERE: Water to
Blood
Frogs
Vermin (lice)
Flies
Diseased Livestock Boils
Thunder and Hail Locusts
Darkness
Death of the Firstborn |
|
