As you know, Katherine Heigl has an arguably well deserved reputation as a royal pain in the ass. At one point she was poised to become the next romcom queen, but several statements she made to the press, along with poor career choices and a reportedly controlling mom/manager, put her career on the downswing. She is now starring in a new political thriller series, State of Affairs, which will premiere on NBC next week. Katherine Heigl was widely criticized by both the mainstream press and industry publications, which did some digging as to her on-set behavior. This wasn’t just the issue of some bloggers nitpicking her very obnoxious public statements. (That’s our job, and we do it well.) Multiple insiders spoke out against Heigl, and there were reports on her diva behavior and career in NY Mag and in The Hollywood Reporter.

In a new interview with E!, Heigl talks about the fallout from that period, and she makes it sound like it was sexism and censoring on the part of the media. She talks about empowering her daughters to speak up for themselves, which I agree with in principle, but she trashed at least two employers publicly. My mom taught me to be firm and speak up for myself, but she’s also told me that you get more flies with honey. There’s a way to state your case without complaining about the people who pay you seven figures to act. This interview with E! shows that Heigl hasn’t changed at all. E!’s Kristen Dos Santos also makes it sound like Heigl is a victim of the media blowing her comments out of proportion. Maybe that happened on some level, but Heigl made her own bed. In fact Dos Santos writes “What happened to the then 29-year-old actress after ‘Shonda-gate’ and ‘Apatow-gate’ was one of the most jarring public lynchings Hollywood has ever seen.” Oh no she did not just use the L word to describe Katherine Heigl’s career. Someone should have edited that sh*t out of there.

Here’s some of Heigl’s interview with E!, and you can read more on E!’s site.

The first time I met you was right when you started Grey’s Anatomy, and I remember being totally floored by how real you were. You didn’t have a filter. You were funny and honest. It’s pretty rare in this town that we get to chat with people who don’t get fed every single line to say. So now, a decade later, given everything you went through, I’m wondering, how has that changed? Do you feel like you need to be a lot more careful about what you say? Can you still speak your mind?
Back when all that happened, I was a little naïve. I didn’t know. At the time, social media and all of that wasn’t what it is now. I didn’t realize the impact that this comment or that comment would have or that it would catch like wildfire. But it did. It spread and it turned into something a lot uglier than I ever intended. Obviously I’m more aware of that now. If I’m going to voice my opinion and I’m going to speak my mind, I better be very clear about what my intentions are when I say it. It should never be flippant or carelessly tossed out there. I’m still going to have opinions and some of them people are going to agree with, and some they won’t. But that’s life and that’s every single person on this planet.

I spent time trying to be more of a publicity packaged thing, and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep at night. It kept me up. It felt so dishonest to me and it felt like such a cop out, like me saying that I am inherently wrong about how I feel about things or I am inherently wrong if I have something to say. I don’t like that for my daughters. I don’t like that for my girlfriends. I don’t like that for any woman in this world to be made to feel like that. You voice, your opinion and you are made to feel like if someone disagrees with you, that now you’re a bad person?

Above all else, you have to be able to respect yourself.
Yes. At the end of the day, call me any name you want but I’m going to continue to stand up for myself and I’m going to continue to be heard and voice what I feel and not be bullied into being a doormat, just so you’ll call me a sweetheart. I don’t want to teach my kids that. And I know certainly some remarkable women like Alfre and my mother and the women that I work with at the network and studio who exude the most gracious confidence in a non-aggressive, non-egotistical way. That’s what I need to learn. I need to learn to be like that and not just vomit my ideas out there.

Once you learn that, I still think it’s important to be true to yourself. I don’t want my kids to feel like they don’t have a voice or that having a voice makes them a bitch. I’ve gone through that phase, too, where I just sit in the corner quietly and look pretty and smile a lot. It’s not terribly satisfying. It’s living in a weird place of fear of what others think about you. But what matters most is what I think about me. I hold myself to the standard that I think is important. Do I have integrity? Am I compassionate? Am I charitable? Am I forgiving? Am I respectful and decent? That’s far more important to me than saying what everyone wants me to say.

Do you think your comments would have been received differently if you were a man? There’s no male equivalent for the word “diva.” Do you feel that women have less freedom to stand up for themselves and what is right, without coming across as abrasive?
Why isn’t there the male equivalent for even bitch? It’s so derogatory. I can get into a whole conversation about this. My husband and I talk about this and he’s like, ‘Well, let’s come up with a word!’ But look, I don’t want to be a victim, either. I don’t want to sit around and complain about the way things are, I want to power through it. My mother never subscribed to the idea that a woman had to be this or a woman was only capable of this in a professional way. Even if that stigma was placed on her in the ’50s and the ’60s and the ’70s, she just ignored it and kept moving forward and kept being who she was capable of being and doing. It’s not always possible if the people in charge say no because the people in charge do say no. But that’s my approach at this point, to not let it make me a victim of society or sexism. It’s up to me to bully my way through it.

[From E! Online]

I like what Heigl said about not painting herself as a victim because she’s not. I would have liked to hear her own her past statements though instead of acting like she was speaking her truth and got eviscerated for it. In Heigl’s mind, she’s either being true to herself by speaking out or she’s “sitting in the corner quietly [to] look pretty and smile a lot.” She did admit that she needs to learn how to be graciously confident and “not just vomit ideas out there.” I do think she’s learning, but I don’t think she’s changed. She still thinks she was right all along and that everyone else misinterpreted her.

Katherine Heigl is shown in September with her husband, Josh Kelley, and on 10-24 at a Big Brother event.