Kate Bosworth stars as Rosalee Futch in DreamWorks’ new romantic comedy Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!. Rosalee is a small-town girl whose dream is to someday meet her big-screen idol Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel). She wins a contest in which she gets to go on a date with Hamilton, much to the chagrin of her best friend and co-worker Pete (Topher Grace), who is deeply, hopelessly — and secretly — in love with Rosalee. However, when Tad meets Rosalee and gets a taste of what he’s been missing in the “real world,” he decides he wants seconds and moves to West Virginia, turning Rosalee’s dream come true into a nightmare for his agent, manager and, most of all, Pete.
Bosworth’s character has an innocence to her as she stares wide-eyed at her crush. She had a similar experience in real life when she landed her first role. “It was ‘The Horse Whisperer’ and I got it basically because I was a horseback rider. I have to say that my first experience meeting a movie star – Robert Redford – which hardly gets bigger. That was pretty amazing. I was 13 so I was pretty young, and I walked into the room and he said, ‘Hi, I’m Bob Redford.’ It’s the same kind of thing. I was much younger and I was sort of just, ‘Hi.’ My mom, I think, was even more starstruck than me.”
But she adds that in the end movie stars are just like you and I. “It’s really comforting actually. I get asked a lot, especially on this press junket, ‘Do I have a Hollywood crush, or what’s it like to be around movie stars,’ and it’s really everybody is just a person.” She also hasn’t lost touch with her friends from before she started acting in Hollywood. “All my friends I’ve had since childhood, so that’s really, really nice. I grew up in small towns all over the country so I don’t have only movie star friends. Everyone’s pretty normal in my life.”
Bosworth knew how she wanted to play Rosalee. “I fell in love with the script when I first read it. I thought it was so sweet. I think that scripts are interesting because you read it and you have something in your head that might be different for different people as to how they have it pictured in their head. When I read it I had that she was this quirky, goofy, sweet girl. I couldn’t wait to play that actually because I can be pretty goofy.”
In the film, Tad goes on the date with Rosalee but actually comes back later looking for love. “One of the lines I had in the movie that said, ‘You fell in love with the idea of me’ is probably the best way to describe it,” adds Bosworth. “I think he was just at the point where actors can’t deal with this anymore, whatever this is. They try to find that normalcy again and I think that he saw that crystal clear in her.”
Topher Grace and Josh Duhamel are both after Rosalee in the film, which is something Kate didn’t mind. “It’s funny. I was watching the film last night and although I knew it was going to happen it was almost slightly embarrassing. You know? I don’t know, that was just my take on it. I was slightly embarrassed to see these two people, because I didn’t see their scenes, obviously, Tad’s scene and Topher’s standoff. And I’m watching this going something’s slightly embarrassing having two guys fighting over you.”
Kate next stars in Kevin Spacey’s Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea. She plays Sandra Dee in the story on the tragic-heroic life of the late teen singing idol. “I actually didn’t watch so many of her movies, I watched a few,” she says about Dee’s films. “When I talked to Kevin about playing her and him playing Bobby Derrin, he said, ‘we’re not imitating characters, we’re taking it and making it our own.’ So that’s the most important thing and I thought – I know her image, I’ve seen a few of her movies, I kind of know her spirit – so I took that and made it into a character and told the story with him, which is really neat.”
What are her thoughts of playing someone who is still in people’s minds? “I was nervous to play somebody who basically you feel like you’re taking responsibility of portraying somebody’s life on screen forever. That can be a tall order, but [Kevin Spacey] has such a vision and he’s had this idea for about 12 years so he’s had quite a long time to think about it and he has it in his head and he’s just executed it brilliantly. It’s amazing to be in somebody’s hand where you feel 100 percent comfortable with what you’re doing.”
She says the film is almost done, “I have about three weeks left. I think it’s about 3/4th’s done.”
And we had to ask, of course, if she could ever win a date with someone, who would it be? “I’ve thought about this, I would have to say it would be James Dean. He always just embodies the cool movie star to me. If you had to go on a date with a movie star, I would say James Dean.”
Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! opens nationwide on Friday, January 23.
