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Where has Bette gone with
Angelica? How will Helena manage on $200 a week? Will Kit and Angus be
parents? And will Jenny ever be normal?
While we wait impatiently for these burning questions to be answered in
Season Four of The L Word, Jennifer Beals steps up to answer your queries
about herself and the life of Bette Porter
Jennifer Beals made her name playing steelworker-slash-exotic dancer Alex in
Flashdance in 1983, and now the smash hit TV series The L Word has
catapulted her back into the limelight. But how come the confirmed
heterosexual is so good at playing a lesbian? And doesn’t she ever get sick
of it? We asked you to ask the questions, and here’s what she had to say.
So, what are you working on at the moment? ~ Kendra, Hull
Nothing much. I’m just enjoying time off before shooting the series’ fifth
season – that’ll take me up to November. And I’m about to start preparing
for a reading of The Vagina Monologues.
The relationship between Bette and Tina is so realistic, I honestly
thought you must be gay until I did my research. How do you manage to play
such a convincing lesbian? ~ Louise, 21, Ormskirk
Because I play the love, and when Bette has sex I play the emotion, not the
gender. To begin with, I was so focussed on Bette’s career when I started
playing the part. I was thinking what it meant to be a museum director, and
the following week it was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m playing a lesbian; what am I
supposed to be doing?’ In the pilot before the first show, I realised the
love scenes are about love between two people who are at odds with each
other and who’ve been like that for so long. After that, I realised that
doing a love scene is like any scene; you have to put as much into it as you
do any other. Those scenes can be so varied, anyway. I have to think what
kind of love it is. There’s a scene where Bette picks someone up in a bar
and that’s just about sex, not love, so I play it from that emotion.
READ THE REST IN THIS MONTH'S DIVA MAGAZINE
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