'I am so spoiled by so many of the projects I've done'': Jennifer Beals talks The L Word, Flashdance prior to Calgary Expo appearance
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It seems unthinkable now, but Jennifer Beals almost didn't accept her star-making role as an 18-year-old welder with aspirations of being a dancer in the 1983 drama, Flashdance.
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Adrian Lyne's sexy dance drama was a big hit at the box office and helped usher in a new style of filmmaking influenced by music videos. The poster featuring Beals in her cut-off sweatshirt became one of the most iconic images in 1980s pop culture.
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The only film work Beals had done before Flashdance was a small and uncredited role in the 1980 family drama My Bodyguard. Still, she almost turned it down.
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'I was offered the part, but they wanted me to do nudity and I said no,'' she says. 'So then they said they would work around that, and I didn't have to do that.'
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She still had reservations. At the time, she had just been accepted into Yale University.
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'I was going to college and I wasn't going to take it if I couldn't defer a term,' says Beals, who will be appearing at Calgary Expo in the new BMO Centre on Saturday and Sunday. 'So I went to my dean and asked if I could defer for a term to go do the film. At that time, and I'm sure still now, people at university were taking time off to go write a novel, to do scientific research and to do all kinds of things.'
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So she deferred a term and became a star.
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But after the film, she went to Yale as a freshman studying American literature, taking only a few roles, such as the 1985 Gothic romance The Bride opposite Sting. It wasn't a complete novelty. Jodie Foster was attending Yale at the same time. Nevertheless, it did seem a bit unusual for an actress to wait a few years before capitalizing on a star-making performance.
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But Beals has never had what could be considered a typical career arc. Her role as passionate young dancer Alex Owens earned her a place in cinematic history, but she says she tends to be asked more about the groundbreaking TV series The L Word and her recurring role as the elegant Twi'lek Garsa Fwip in the Disney+ Star Wars series The Book of Boba Fett at fan conventions these days.
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Her event in Calgary may be called Dancing Queen: Spotlight on Jennifer Beals, but she never considered herself a dancer. In 2011, she famously turned down a chance to compete on Dancing With the Stars. 'I am not a dancer,' she emphatically told People Magazine at the time. Flashdance may have made her a 1980s dance-movie icon on the same level as Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing and Kevin Bacon in Footloose, but the footwork in the film was mostly done by a body double.
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In 2004, Beals signed on to play affluent Ivy League-educated art curator and biracial lesbian Bette Porter in The L Word, a show that followed the lives of lesbians and bisexual women in West Hollywood. She played the role for five years in the series and reprised Porter for the sequel, The L Word: Generation Q, which ran from 2019 to 2021.
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The Beach Boys were formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles, by brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and their friend Al Jardine, and the regional success that year of their first single, Surfin,' thrust them to national attention when Capitol Records signed them almost immediately as the label's first rock act. They would make the Billboard Top 40 list 36 times in as many years, a tally unequaled by an American band. While each member contributed to the Beach Boys' signature angelic vocal harmonics, Mr. Wilson was the widely acknowledged mastermind behind their music. A spectacularly imaginative songwriter, he was responsible for initial successes including Surfin' USA, Surfer Girl, I Get Around, All Summer Long, Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of the Sun and California Girls. Such numbers evoked the joys of hot-rodding under boundlessly blue skies and, above all, the bronzed, bikinied lifestyle of Southern California. 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