“They wouldn’t consider me”: the movie Uma Thurman waited 20 years to make
Some actors have a type, where no matter how many different types of movies they do, no matter what they do on screen, they will always be defined by one particular role, and for Uma Thurman, that role is ‘The Bride’.
Ever since she slipped into that iconic yellow jumpsuit and starred in Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked Kill Bill duology, Thurman has been typecast as an all-out action heroine, and while this association has brought her worldwide fame and adoration, it has also come with a price.
The actor has been very open about not restricting herself, and she deliberately avoided action films following the success of Kill Bill, desperate to prove that she could do more than swing a sword around. One genre she was desperate to try was comedy, and she finally got her chance with 2006’s My Super Ex-Girlfriend, from legendary Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, which does exactly what it says on the tin.
Luke Wilson stars as a man who begins dating someone he thinks is the woman of his dreams, but unfortunately, when Jennifer (Thurman) begins to give him the ick, he dumps her. This is when he discovers that she is actually the superhero G-Girl, possessing superhuman strength, speed, and the ability to fly, so cue Jenifer using her powers to make her ex’s life as miserable as possible.
Growing up idolising the likes of Doris Day, Thurman was chomping at the bit to take the lead role in a zany romcom. As she explained to The Independent while promoting the film, My Super Ex-Girlfriend represented the culmination of a very long journey in the world of comedy.
“I’ve been trying to do it for 20 years, and nobody would give me a job,” she said, “I’ve always known I would be good at it if anybody would let me do it. I read scripts, and I wanted to do them, but they wouldn’t consider me, only other people that you know who do those kinds of movies all the time. I couldn’t even get auditions for certain things. So this is very exciting for me, and I’m hoping that I can do more like this.”
If only people had been as happy to watch this film as Thurman had been to star in it, because My Super Ex-Girlfriend received middling reviews, as its screenplay, characterisation, and plot all came in for harsh criticism.
This was at the time, though; I haven’t seen the movie, but it looks like it’s aged about as well as a bucket of sick left in a sauna. Thurman herself did receive some praise, though, and maybe a superhero parody like this was ahead of its time, given how popular the genre would become in the years following.
Her long-awaited comedy debut might not have lived up to expectations, but it opened a lot of doors for Thurman. She would go on to appear in a number of other ‘funny’ films over the next few years, like The Accidental Husband, Playing For Keeps, and The Con is On, which have all been broadly terrible, but that’s not the point.
