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ShareThe very title “She’s Out of My League” might scare mere mortals away from wanting to play the “She,” or even from that first meeting with the filmmakers. You can’t have an ounce of humility about your looks if you’re described in the script as “a ten, a HARD ten.”
Alice Eve didn’t flinch.
“I only found out about the ‘hard ten’ thing afterwards,” she protests. “But you know what it is? Even when they describe the character as ‘beautiful’ or ‘gorgeous,’ you have to treat it the way you would an audition for a character who’s supposed to be pregnant or a heroin addict. You can’t assume that the description in the script is all that you are, or aren’t. You have to show up and try to play it, carry yourself as she would and maybe they’ll see you as the character, even if you aren’t a heroin addict of a ‘hard ten.’”
We’re convinced. Eve, 28, is a native Brit once labeled a “posh blonde” by the BBC — a label that still sticks. Eve went all out, playing a successful and gorgeous young woman who is drawn, somewhat inexplicably, to Kirk, an airport security guard played by Jay Baruchel — nobody’s idea of a “hard ten.” What convinces her that audiences will buy into it?
“Tiger Woods,” she says. “My character had been totally heartbroken by this hunk pilot. He’d cheated on her and if you’ve ever lived through anything like that, you know how traumatic that is. I mean, look at the Tiger Woods thing, all the pain and humiliation that’s caused. Your natural reaction after something like that is to look for the guy’s exact opposite, someone who is honest and who plays his cards straight. Kirk, to her, is a guy with a lot less ego, somebody who isn’t inclined to cheat.”
Eve says she could “totally fall for a guy like Baruchel, who’s “tall and funny and smells nice.”
The message of the movie? “Recognize your good traits as assets,” Eve says.
Or maybe “personality counts,” jokes Krysten Ritter, the “hard ten” who plays the best friend of Eve’s character. Ritter claims that it’s “a Hollywood myth, an over-generalization” that stunning women travel in packs, but here the matched 28-year-olds are, crossing the country, doing promotional events at Hooters near and far.
“My character was described in the script as sort of ‘frumpy, unattractive best friend,’ ” Ritter recalls. “When I got the role I was like, ‘I guess I can go out drinking until all hours, la di dah!’”
But Eve, who has earned great reviews for giving dimensions to other characters who might have just been a “posh blonde” or a “hard ten,” still says that label is a trap. She knows what goes into creating that image.
“You watch what you have to eat, do Pilates, get as many facials as you can stand, spend way too much time getting your hair puffed out, all for this role,” she says. “It takes a team of people to turn you into someone who looks like that girl on the film.”
