'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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