Heather Graham has had ‘problems’ choosing men. It’s one of the reasons she wanted to make fun of herself in her new movie, Chosen family.
The 54-year-old actress knows that one look at her makes people think she’s lucky in love, but in reality, Graham tells Yahoo Entertainment, her personal life has been a bit more chaotic.
“I wanted to explore the theme that if there are dysfunctional things in your family, sometimes you also date people who have dysfunctional things. That you can unconsciously be drawn to these dynamics that you don’t like. I wanted to explore that… because I did them,” says Graham, who has been estranged from her parents for almost thirty years, about her second feature film.
The film stars Graham as Ann, a yoga teacher with a rough dating history thanks to her manic family and inability to say no. When a potential new love enters her life, she relies on her friends to help her navigate the complicated situation.
Graham lays out some of her real-life exes this way in the film’s press notes: “a club owner who lived in a house full of models, a man who had intense tantrums once or twice a week, someone who lived with his ex.” -girlfriend, a man who ended up in a mental institution after entering a bar with a toy gun, a super jealous man who read all my text messages, a man who freaked out when he lost a pumpkin carving contest and a man who wouldn’t put up with it to wear a toupee.”
“I definitely think I’m having trouble with my picker,” she tells Yahoo. Although Graham – who has been linked to actors like Heath Ledger and Josh Lucas – won’t name names, she says it wasn’t all bad while dating in Hollywood.
“I’ve had the opportunity to date a lot of cool, great guys,” she says. “I just think my family was in trouble. I would gravitate to the kind of messed up people and try to fix them, which is not a recipe for success.” (The actress has been in a relationship with snowboarder John de Neufville since 2022.)
After hits like Boogie nights And Austin Powers: The Spy Who Fucked MeGraham was labeled a sex symbol in the 1990s and early 1990s. When asked if that was a blessing or a curse in her personal life, she laughs, “It’s funny because sometimes I look at pictures of myself and think, ‘Why did I settle for dating?’ [that guy]?”
Graham believes “the culture” has shifted around the way female sex symbols are talked about.
“I feel like, especially in that period – and I see it in my contemporaries, if you look at someone like Pamela Anderson – if you were a sexy woman, it felt like people wanted to say something mean about you,” says them. say.
Graham says men were never judged as ‘hard’ if they were considered sexy. But if you were “a sexy woman,” it felt like people were looking for a way to “criticize you.”
“It feels like a woman can be sexy, and now we don’t have to find something wrong with her to criticize,” the actress adds.
Chosen Family tells the story of family, friends and relationships through a female lens – with female director Graham at the helm. She blames “sexism” and “patriarchy” for the entertainment industry’s long delay in realizing there is an audience out there that craves these types of projects.
“Hopefully things will change, but it will change slowly,” she says. “And I think there’s a huge market for women, including myself, who want to watch this kind of content.”
Chosen Family is in theaters and on-demand Friday, October 11.
