Elizabeth Hurley Plays it Nasty on Gossip Girl

Elizabeth Hurley has been turning heads for most of her life as a model, a film actress and on television.  She’s best known for playing the role of Vanessa Kensington in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”, but she’s also appeared in many other films, on the covers of magazines, and in a long list of commercials and ad campaigns.  She stopped by the SiriusXM studios recently to talk to Ron Bennington about her most recent project, appearing in Season 5 of the CW’s “Gossip Girls”. Excerpts from that interview appear below.

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Ron Bennington: How is it jumping into a show like Gossip Girl, that’s already been going on for a while?

Elizabeth Hurley: Well it’s interesting. Not only did I come in on season five, it’s actually the first TV I’d even done as well.

Ron Bennington: You hadn’t done any TV before that?

Elizabeth Hurley: Not really. I’d made a few miniseries a long time ago, but mostly I’d just done movies so it was a new experience on every level, and a very different experience too for an actor to go into a TV show. Very different way of working, and I had to get used to it fast obviously.

Ron Bennington: Is it because of the speed of it?

Elizabeth Hurley: It’s just different. I mean, with a movie, you get your script and you say yes or no to the job and then it’s normally a couple of months before you shoot it, and then you know the shooting schedule so you know which scene is going in three months’ time, which is next week, and there’s all that. It just doesn’t happen like that. As you know, with TV, you turn up on the day and you get given a script, and the most you ever get is 48 hours to have read it, and they rewrite it as you’re going along. It’s a very different – quite scary experience in a way. But once you get into it, quite liberating and nice.

Ron Bennington: But when you’re doing a TV show is there room for anything else in your life, or is it just about learning these lines, shooting…

Elizabeth Hurley: I would’ve thought, obviously I came on and did six months on it and that’s my lot. These guys have been on it for nearly five years now. I think it’s difficult for them. They all do stuff in their hiatus, I wouldn’t, I’d go home. But they all seem to – they’re young – they want to work in their hiatus, they want to work at weekends, they want to get extra days off here to fly somewhere else to do something. I’d want to be lying on the sofa with a book myself. But yeah, I think it’s pretty all-consuming when you’re on one of these huge shows, and obviously it’s very rewarding for them in many ways, both creatively and other ways, but it’s a whole different thing, a completely different part of show business.

Ron Bennington: This isn’t the kind of youth that you had though right? When you were growing up fashion didn’t play as big of a role?

Elizabeth Hurley: It’s completely different you’re so right. The interesting thing doing this show is because a lot of the audience is girls age 14-24, of course there’s older people and younger people who love it as well, and boys, but that’s a real core part of their audience so it’s a very new audience for me to reach that particular age group at this time, and I’m fascinated by these girls. So, I’ve got new fans and new admirers and new people that come up to me on the street and I think they’re very different to how we were at 14. They’re not worse, in fact they’re enchanting most of them, but they’re very different they’re very fashion oriented.

Ron Bennington: Yeah, they’re very brand conscious.

Elizabeth Hurley: Very. I wasn’t like that.

Ron Bennington: What was your style as a teenager?

Elizabeth Hurley: Well, I was just talking about this earlier, I think when I was a teen, of course we wanted to be cool and we wanted to be different, but I don’t think I’d even heard of any designers when I was 14 or 15. I didn’t covet a Chanel bag or Versace sunglasses, I wouldn’t have even heard of them. So it’s very different for me now to see all these kids so gemmed up, it’s so available through various mediums, they all know everything and they all have copies of everything and they know it’s a copy of something, and they save up for the original. It’s just completely different, it’s bizarre.

Ron Bennington: And I think growing up in England fashion gets set by bands too so what music you listen to becomes how you dress.

Elizabeth Hurley: I couldn’t agree with you more and when I went through that stage I was obsessed with punk which was way over by then, but I loved it as a sort of a retro thing so for us, of course, that’s how we wanted to look. We wanted to look like Siouxsie and the Banshees or we wanted to look like whoever. We’d copy their makeup, we wanted to be cool and different. We wanted to really be the opposite of our parents whereas now little girls seem to want to look like their mummies. They steal clothes they steal handbags and they want their makeup done. We would’ve rather died than look like our mothers.

Ron Bennington: You have how many different kind of jobs now?

Elizabeth Hurley: Well I have a lot of jobs. A lot of little hats to wear, but that’s why it’s been exceptionally nice going back to Gossip Girl and putting on my sort of familiar hat which is hired actor, hired hand, and being told where to go, being told what time to turn up, being dressed, having my makeup done, you know it’s really going back to being sort of a little girl again, because I took a lot of time out to raise my son and develop other business interests. I didn’t really realize what a very strange environment I’d lived in for so long as an actor and it took a little bit of getting a mindset back into it again of just how sort of closeted or how looked-after you are as an actor. How you’re not really that grown up in some ways because you are shunted backwards and forwards and you stand and you’re dressed nicely and you’re made up nicely and you’re given your props and you take them nicely then you hand them back to the prop man. You kind of have to ask to go to the loo. I’d forgotten being on the set saying, “Can I have five minutes, please sir?” And off you go again. It’s just very different, I mean I kind of love it because it’s my comfort zone, but I’d forgotten it because I’d been running my own businesses having to be a grown up.

Ron Bennington: But when you said you step away because you had a kid, that’s something that men never do, only women will think, alright, my life has changed now that I have a child. A man will be like, yeah, OK, everything’s back the same, somebody take care of the kid. But I think women, on that other hand, they’re like how do I work my kid into this life that I’m living?

Elizabeth Hurley: Well, I couldn’t – and it was quite interesting, I watched a movie the other night which was Sarah Jessica Parker, it’s called I Don’t Know How She Does It or something, she was trying to juggle a big career and her child, and of course you do identify with every moment in that movie whether you liked it or not, and for me, I was a single mom when I had my child at the beginning, and I think because my life was so much more chaotic than your average mom, you know, still very difficult going to the office 9 until 6, but at least you have a routine and you have your set holiday time, because my life was living out of a suitcase and you know, it’s three months here, it could be six months there, it could be five months there, and then two weeks there, and then home for two days to change and then you’re off again, which was a life which – it seemed very normal to me because that was my life right from when I left school, but I began to realize what an extraordinary life that was for a kid if that was their reality because, you know, I had a very normal suburban upbringing until I was 18 so I had that to draw back on as my stability. And then when madness followed it was quite easy to deal with, but I though, for this little boy, if he grows up in madness, how is he ever going to relate to anybody else who’s just gone to school every day. You know, gone and stood with their mother in the super market, and I’ve really tried to do as much as I can with him which is back to how my childhood was. I haven’t succeeded in everything because you know, I’m a privacy freak, so you know he still has a little bit of sharing my strange form of agoraphobia, but I’ve done as much as I can to keep him as grounded as I can.

Ron Bennington: And for the first few years I guess you could fool a kid into acting like, well this is reality. They will just buy in because they don’t know any other way. But after a certain point there, they’ve got to be like, wait…

Elizabeth Hurley: Well I think so, and I realized that point because I was still trying to juggle and do everything. I was still trying to shoot, I was trying to take him with me on location, and then when we were in London I realized that we never ever left our house without having at least a dozen men following us and running backward in front of him, and I suddenly just thought – and me getting very upset by it, I could get angry or I could get upset – and I remember one day, he was little he was only about three, and we were just about to leave the house and I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and he picked up an umbrella from the umbrella stand, it wasn’t raining, and I said “Darling why do you need that?” And he said, “Because if any of those men are outside there talk to you I’m going to hit them.” I said, “You can’t do that.” He said, “I don’t like them talking to you like that.” And I thought, OK that’s enough. He can’t have aggression and violence be his thought as he leaves the house every day on the way to school, so that’s when we moved to the country and I said that’s it, I’m not doing any long gigs, I’ll do little short ones, but I’m going to be at home, and I think it was a good move.

Ron Bennington: Is it fun though to play mean?

Elizabeth Hurley: I love it. Throughout my career I’ve pretty much split between being an English rose and being very sweet, and being absolutely immoral and reprehensible in many ways, and I have to say there’s a part of me now that quite enjoys the latter, so actually I love this. I was nasty in this. Evil.

Ron Bennington: It’s Gossip Girl, Mondays 8 o’clock central on the CW, you can check that out at CWTV.com. Elizabeth Hurley, thank you so much for stopping by.

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.

Follow Elizabeth Hurley on twitter at @elizabethhurley and check out Gossip Girl on The CW.