And for her next trick, Katherine Heigl will run from Mormons. Fundamentalist mormons, that is. In the creepy, Harry-Dean-Stanton-on–Big Love sense.
Now that she’s proven her box office might by powering the much reviled 27 Dresses to $76 million domestic, Heigl’s ready for you to take her seriously. Ergo, once she’s done yukking it up with Gerard “Guess I’m Not a Movie Star After All” Butler on Robert Luketic’s The Ugly Truth (which is a little too close to The Awful Truth for my taste), she’ll play Carolyn Jessop, a lifelong member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (of a Lesser God) who helped sic the Feds on her ex-husband Warren Jeffs. You may recall Jeffs as the gentle human being who officiated the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl (amongst other sordid shenanigans, all of which ultimately landed him in the poky for ten-to-life).
Heigl’s film will be based on Jessop’s memoir Escape, which details her relationship with Jeffs from their marriage (when she was eighteen and he was thirty-two) to her eventual flight at the age of thirty-five (by which point she’d acquired eight children). There’s no screenwriter attached as of yet, but I betcha Ron Bass would accept a seven-figure sum to write this in his sleep.