When news broke last summer that Kate Upton was smooching Jaime Lannister on the set of "The Other Woman," I wrote it off as nothing more than a minor cameo. A brief role in a motion picture would be but a quick detour on Kate's meteoric ascendance in the modeling universe. Kate was coming off of back-to-back SI Swimsmoke covers, and her name would add just enough juice to con youngsters to drop $12.50 for a crappy rom-com.
While the North American release is two weeks away, Kate is making the international press rounds. Unsurprisingly, she has dazzled the foreign media with her Hollywood glamour and sunny disposition. A recent interview with the Australian Sydney Morning Herald left me with a foreboding sense of awfulness to come.
"'I was bitten a little by an acting bug so I took acting classes for two years,'' she offers as evidence the move is more than a whim. ''Now I'm full in, I love it!''
Kate loves acting? Does this mean she will forsake her calling as this generation's smokiest of the smokes? What Kate told the Aussie paper echoed comments made by a similarly bodacious blonde, who was also coming off of a SI Swimsmoke cove and who also looked to transition to acting:
I've always been interested in acting, but it's something I never thought I could do. It was something I always wanted to study before I really, really got into it. I just got really lucky with this opportunity. I've auditioning quite a bit actually over the last few years, and was sort of afraid of the whole model-turned-actress cliche, so I kept it under wraps that I was auditioning. I went through the auditioning process for this role and got lucky enough and got it! It was the best learning experience, the best education possible.
That’s Brooklyn Decker speaking about her role in the 2011 Adam Sandler cash grab "Just Go With It." In fact, Brooklyn is the only thing anyone ever remembers about the flick that mustered 19% on Rotten Tomatoes. This will jog your memory:
Kate and Brooklyn share more than just being blonde SI Swimsmokes sisters. Both are in movies that seem to have been filmed at the same beach.
Kate is unperturbed by the naysayers:
''It actually makes it easier when people underestimate you.'' Beware of the dumb blonde exterior, she warned in an interview last year with Elle magazine. ''People deal with models like they are children. I'm always like: 'I'm about to pull something over on you, and you're so focused on thinking I'm dumb, you're not even going to know!' '
While I know Kate will succeed at anything she puts her mind to, she should examine Brooklyn's path as a cautionary tale.
Brooklyn's career didn't quite take off as she probably thought it would when she found out she would be co-starring with Jennifer Anniston and Sandler. She lost out on the female lead for the sixth-highest grossing film ever and instead wound up starring in one of 2012's biggest duds. The only bright sides: She avoided catching whatever strand of crazy Shia LaBeouf infects people with, and no one remembers "Battleship" was even a movie.
Brooklyn is currently nursing her acting career on a CBS sitcom, in which she is held hostage by E from Entourage on a show that's not Big Bang Theory. They all look the same so I tend to lose track.
"The Other Woman" is directed by the guy who made "The Notebook," a film every guy in America has been forced to watch at least once by a significant other in his life. You pray that the Gosling-McAdams magic is replicated with Lannister-Upton. But I remain doubtful.
The movie is also armed with a R rating. So it can't be all that bad.
Since Kate already has exceeded Brooklyn’s modeling career by leaps and bounds, it’s not unreasonable to imagine Kate foregoing modeling to act full time. "Kate Upton: Movie Star" would beat out the iPhone as America's greatest international export.
Let’s just cross our fingers that Hollywood megastardom is a ways down the road.
