Kate Beckinsale is retelling a tale from the beginning of her acting career.
The actress, 46, featured on the cover of the January/February issue of Women’s Health, claims that Michael Bay instructed her to exercise when he cast her in his 2001 film Pearl Harbor.
“It wasn’t great, it didn’t make me feel good, and in general, I think women are body-shamed 100 million percent more than men. But on this particular project, I wasn’t,” she says.
Beckinsale claims that she was already aware of a more significant adjustment Bay had requested of Ben Affleck when the actor featured Armageddon in the director’s 1998 picture.
“Ben [Affleck], who’d already done a movie with the director, was like, ‘This happened to me. They made me get new teeth,'” Beckinsale recalls. “And I was like, ‘Cool, at least I get to hang on to my actual teeth.'”
Bay previously mentioned Affleck’s teeth in the Armageddon DVD commentary.
“We paid for a set of $20,000 pearly white teeth. Ben’s gonna hate that story,” Bay said on the commentary, according to The Ringer. “I always liked low shots that kinda come right under your chin and make you a little bit heroic, and he kinda had these baby teeth.”
“So I told [producer] Jerry Bruckheimer, ‘God, he’s got these baby teeth, Jerry, I don’t know what to do!'” he continued. “Jerry used a very famous star in a plane movie that he replaced teeth with so he said, ‘We did it to him, why not do it to Ben?’ So my dentist had Ben sitting in a dentist’s chair for a week, eight hours a day.”
Previously, Beckinsale spoke candidly about her relationship with Bay in an appearance on The Graham Norton Show in 2016.
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“I don’t think I fitted the type of actress Michael Bay, the director, had met before. I think he was baffled by me because my boobs weren’t bigger than my head and I wasn’t blonde,” she said at the time. “I’d just had my daughter and had lost weight but was told that if I got the part I’d have to work out, and I just didn’t understand why a 1940s nurse would do that.”
“When we were promoting the film, Michael was asked why he had chosen Ben and Josh. He said, ‘I have worked with Ben before and I love him, and Josh is so manly and a wonderful actor,'” Beckinsale continued. “And then when he was asked about me, he’d say, ‘Kate wasn’t so attractive that she would alienate the female audience.’ He kept saying it everywhere we went and we went to a lot of places.”
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