A True Hollywood Story: Let’s Talk About Jessica Biel

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There are certain narratives in Hollywood that are as old as the industry itself: The child star all grown up; the sexy reinvention; the celebrity power couple love story; the Earth mother evolution. The first fan magazines were chock full of glowing reports on the lives of the rich and famous, from their slimming techniques to their enviable marriages. You can find variations of those narratives in every iteration of gossip, be in the scandalous tabloids or the more respectable glossies. These are the stories needed to keep a star famous, and to hook the interests of audiences who have grown used to new faces every week. It’s fascinating how little these moulds change. We’re still shocked by child stars going adult in the most risque manners possible, and we still get excited when two famous people pair up to marry, have babies and suddenly form an interest in lifestyle branding. Everyone in the public eye will go through at least one of these narratives, but it’s rare to see one star embody them all, and to so little fanfare.

Jessica Biel has done it all: She shed her painfully pure youthful image through a raunchy photoshoot; she rose to prominence through middling roles that gave her enough visibility to become a sex symbol; she dated eligible bachelors and married one; then she took on the celebrity mother persona with real zeal and increased profit margins. Now, as the age of Peak TV sees the medium become a welcoming home for actors big and small, Biel is moving into the possibilities of a new age with her role in The Sinner. You probably didn’t think about her that way, or really care, but such is the fate of the sex symbol.

Biel got her start, like many child actors, in TV and print adverts but it didn’t take long for her to be cast in the pilot for the WB family drama, 7th Heaven, in the role of daughter Mary. The show was a massive success, running for 11 seasons and giving the WB its best ratings ever. It’s still the most watched series on the network and holds the record for their most watched hour of TV, an impressive 12.5m viewers. Nowadays, that’s Game of Thones ratings, but for a mid-90s clean-cut family drama that now airs on the Hallmark Channel in syndication, those were some astounding numbers. The notoriously censorship friendly Parents Television Council loved the show, frequently citing it as one of the most family-friendly shows on-air, although it’s hard to see how a conservative think-tank would ever be disapproving of a show about a good Christian family working their problems out together. Even when the show took on darker subjects, it remained a sweet and syrupy watch. The acting’s varied in quality, the production values look cheap (despite the show costing a surprising amount to run), and it embodied the textbook definition of ‘uncool’. By the late 90s, the WB were actively trying to court a younger, hipper audience with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Roswell, but it was 7th Heaven that brought them the ratings they craved.

It wasn’t much of an acting boon for Biel, who is decent in the show but has very little to work with. Movie roles were also thin on the ground, although she did make her feature debut in the Oscar nominated drama Ulee’s Gold alongside Peter Fonda. Being the vaguely cool rebel on a show as apple pie wholesome as 7th Heaven would probably have felt smothering for a young talent like Biel. Unfortunately, the industry has few options for young women to make the jump into adulthood without being heavily sexualised. For Biel, this took the form of an infamous nude shoot with the now defunct Gear magazine, founded by none other than Bob Guccione Jr., son of the Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. Guccione Jr pitched Gear as a successor to more upmarket titles like GQ, who balanced top journalism and expensive style with the occasional nude woman. Advertisers saw it differently and sold it more like a lads mag, which has much cheaper connotations. Biel’s cover for Gear, captioned with the headline ‘Fallen Angel’, is very much a 2000 cover: The come hither pose, the Jennifer Aniston haircut, the vaguely seedy air around the entire pose, which evokes Page 3 models.