Uma Thurman

Interview By: Rick Mele
RickMele@TheCinemaSource.com

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Uma Thurman is no stranger to playing the ass-kicking superwoman. From turns in Quentin Tarantino's highly-successful Kill Bill series to a role as the Batman villainess Poison Ivy, Uma's been playing strong female characters at the box office for years, and I do mean strong. In her new role as Jenny/G-girl, the oh-so-needy title character in the new film My Super Ex-Girlfriend, however, Thurman takes it to a whole new level.

Directed by comedy legend Ivan Reitman, who's responsible for some of the biggest and funniest comedies of the last three decades (Ghostbusters, Stripes, Old School, Animal House), My Super Ex-Girlfriend isn't your typical comic-book movie. The film revolves more around Uma's fledgling relationship with co-star Luke Wilson than an epic battle to save the world. My Super Ex-Girlfriend attempts a 'naturalistic' take on what happens when you try to break up with a superhero, and a needy, possessive and clingy one to boot. Poor Luke.

But underneath all the special effects and superpowers, My Super Ex-Girlfriend remains, for Uma, a very truthful movie. 'When you look at these things [the images], you look at the heart of them and that's kind of what actually makes it work. It's not just 'Oh, we're funny and glib and it's great,' but underneath even these little ideas you find what's real and then take what's unreal and you have the beauty of the statement 'Imagine a woman so brokenhearted, that she flies out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, plucks a great white shark from the sea and goes to throw it at her unfaithful lover.' It's funny, but underneath it, that's passion. That comes from real emotion.'

And, for Uma, much of the real emotion of the film comes from grounding it in the realm of everyday experience. Jenny may be a superhero, but she's still a person behind the costume, and her superpowers don't make her any better equipped to handle life's little problems. It was this sort of inability to cope that endeared Uma to her character.

'What I like more, what I find sort of touching, some of the women I've played, [is] when you try too hard and you just ruin everything' The far-fetched stuff is the far-fetched stuff, but the real simple stuff is the desperate sort of neediness of someone just trying to make you like 'em.'

'So, you know,' she continues, 'I just enjoyed that kind of vulnerability of a really strong and bold character, and I think I know most women identify with, and a lot of men too, that thing where you're just trying to squeeze, like a bar of soap, and the more you squeeze, the further it flies! [laughs] That's sort of my side of the break-up, being that, and we've all been there, that sort of desperate thing just like 'Do you like me' Please' You must like me!' Totally crazy, and just letting her kind of go wild from there.'

But Uma denies basing the character on any real-life break-ups, saying, 'I don't know, when a break-up happens, usually these things aren't a big surprise, but for the sake of drama, we have here a kind of slightly whack-job character that gets taken by surprise. 'But I think in real life, it's really not that much of a surprise. I mean, anyone who's sobbing over 'surprise, surprise, surprise' wasn't paying attention.'

The benefit of playing G-girl for Uma was the ability to take these real-life situations and play them more broadly, by having her character take the normal reaction to its extreme. She comments, 'You know when something really bad happens to you' Now, real women, what do we do mostly' We pretend it's not happening. 'It's that thing when you come out of the room and you've been humiliated, or something really crappy has happened to you and you're like, 'I wish I could've said this, or that'' and you're still mad. Well that's where [Jenny] lives, right there, except he's still in the room. [laughs]'

But with all those borderline-psychopathic overreactions, wasn't Uma worried that her character might come across as too unsympathetic' She replies, 'We walked a very fine line with that actually; there was a lot of pressure when I got involved. There was a great draft that Ivan had worked on with [writer Don Payne] and then there was a new draft where she was actually even more sort of villainized and awful. And it was this whole kind of push, because you don't want to take the punch out of it. You don't want to be sissy about it and likeable, because that's really boring. You guys get that everyday, are force fed it.'

'So meanwhile, the fun of it is that she's wicked, but, you know, it was trying to find the humanity, make sure the characters stayed motivated and human, and that's what we got out of the movie and out of the scripts.'

For screenwriter Payne, it's a credit to Uma that, as badly-behaved and crazy as Jenny may be, the audience still feels sympathy for her. Never one to let a compliment go unreturned, when asked about the motivation behind writing the script, Uma good-naturedly ribs him, 'Don's been deeply traumatized by some heavy duty bitches. You know, this is a cathartic expression of a survivor. [laughs]'

And it's this type of sense of humor that attracted Uma to the script in the first place. Commenting on her super-powered sex scene, she says, 'I generally don't find sex scenes that interesting in a lot of movies anymore' but this is funny. I mean, can you think of a funnier sex scene in a movie' 'I think you gotta almost go overseas to get the humor back in sex. And I love seeing that in a mainstream American movie, having some lightness and humor; it's not all like stagied up with the pasties on and weird.'

That sense of reality and humanity, even in a movie where characters can fly around on a whim, pervades the entire film, influencing every bit of My Super Ex-Girlfriend, from Don's script to G-girl's costume. Uma discusses her costume, saying, 'Most importantly, the whole underpinning of the movie is that it's a romantic comedy, and it's Earth-based and that's the humor. That's what Don wrote and Ivan directed. It's not like, you know, your typical rubber suit. If you want The Incredibles, animate it. We wanted to do something that's just about everyday.'

'Like if you stumbled upon a meteor and suddenly had superpowers and you're a New York girl, or from wherever you may be, what do you do' Target, the mall, Gucci' You got to put together a look, right' You gotta keep your identity under control. So we just approached it from a very earthly, work-a-day [perspective], and that's the texture of the movie.'

That may be, but I'd still imagine it's not easy saving the world in high heels. 'Well,' Uma replies, 'if you're gonna save the world, you should do it in style.' Can't argue with that.