Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon

In her new movie, Valentine, Katherine Heigl gets the coveted role played by Drew Barrymore and Jada Pinkett in the Scream flicks - she’s the first to get gored. Call it 'When Blind Dates With Stalker Tendencies Attack'. Heigl plays a med student who makes the mistake of going back to the lab after a frightfully bad date. "She dies a very gruesome, terrible death," Heigl says, with a laugh. "She goes back to school to study after a date with this absolute jackass of a guy, and goes to work on cadavers. You can imagine where it goes from there."

But even though she’s the first to go, the Roswell star enjoyed each of her 15 minutes on screen. "It was just fun to play somebody older. After playing an 18-year-old on the TV show the last few years, it was great to play somebody who could be a medical student!" And, indeed, Heigl, 22, has had other awkward Valentine’s Days. "I had just come back to school one January, and I started dating this guy I really liked, who was a year older. It was fun, not that serious, and then I became interested in this senior guy that I really liked. So on Valentine’s Day, the guy I was dating wanted to come over and make out on the couch. And the guy I really liked sent a dozen roses. He comes over thinking we’re going to make out, and the roses are on the counter. So I had to get rid of one to date the other - I could see which was the better one!"

These days, Heigl’s current boyfriend is trying to get her into Radiohead. She’s not so convinced about that. "It’s hard for me because it’s so different and weird. I like Coldplay - ‘Yellow’ is my new favorite song." But in the end, she’d rather listen to something that exposes her suburban-Connecticut roots - Neil Diamond’s ‘Hot August Night’. "My mother missed a Neil Diamond concert giving birth to me," she says. "My boyfriend will go put on Radiohead, and I’m like, ‘Can’t we just play ‘Hot August Night’?"

Interview and article by David Daley