Jennifer Grey Opens Up About Plastic Surgery, Patrick Swayze & Former Loves | PEOPLE

dropping in to this moment i'm awesome i just am i'm awesome not because i'm superhuman or perfect because i'm none of those things i just have come to understand that who i am not who you think i am not what they say about me just who i am i have no question about it so i feel pretty good in this skin see we're collecting money to buy ferris bueller new kidney they run about 50 g's or so so if you could help out go piss up a flagpole i'm sorry you should be hey jennifer gray landed her breakout role in the classic 1986 comedy ferris bueller's day off and the following year she had the time of her life playing france's baby houseman in the beloved romantic drama dirty dancing i'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way i feel when i'm with you today the 62 year old actress is about to publish her first book out of the corner which will be released may 3rd the deeply personal memoir begins with a brave prologue which details the devastating fallout from jennifer's early 90s rhinoplasty when you talk about the placement of that rhinoplasty story being in the prologue that is solely from my editor barbara jones it was her genius because i had basically written 500 pages before anyone looked at it and i just didn't know how to put it together and i knew that i wanted to start off the book with something scary or dark and then just slingshot back to it let me just tell you this is how i got here and i thought well how did i ever think of doing anything else first because i've had a lot of very dramatic things happen in my life so i was like picking through them but nothing could have touched this one it was just bizarre let's just put it that way it was freaking bizarre it was like an episode of the twilight zone and i was inside it and i couldn't get out for decades and i was thinking i'm so tired of being misunderstood and reduced the reductive nature of people's judgment or whatever they're projecting onto me of their own insecurity or that they related to me as a girl with an imperfect nose or a jewish nose or not totally pretty enough to be a movie star that i would dare to do that would made them feel like i was doing something to them i don't know what the psychology of it was but it was relentless and i was traumatized by it when i decided am i going to spend the rest of my life trying to convince strangers that i don't know who i am and what kind of a human being i am even though they're accusing me of being someone who's addicted to the knife or self sabotaging i'm self sabotaging don't get me wrong just not that way you know mine's much more of like the silent invisible you know version it's much more in my head but that i would disfigure myself or be you know unable to be satisfied it's not my story i actually never wanted the nose job in the first place and that really offended me that they projected onto me that i didn't like how i looked i loved how i looked i didn't have to look at myself i just felt beautiful and it made me feel like dude there's nothing wrong with how i am except i couldn't get a job i'd become famous and then i couldn't get a job and so i fought it so it was a little bit of a like a triple trigger and so i finally got to really say i'm done i'm done trying to define myself to you know explain myself defend myself i'm just going to give up and people can think whatever they want anyway because they're going to thank god you're you know we've been worried sick about you out of the corner also delves into jennifer's relationship with her ferris bueller's day off co-star matthew broderick i learned so many things about myself from my relationship with matthew broderick i mean first of all we were really young like we were in our mid-20s when we got together and from where i sit now it's pretty young and we were i mean i don't know i can only speak for myself i was really in love with him and i was you know with a guy who had just whose star had just like it was he was in such a high moment of his career because he had done war games before he met him and he won the tony and he was just this genius smart funny cute i don't know there was just something so jewish in new york about him that i just felt like you know when you read a little bit more about my family it felt like home okay and all that that entails and you know you keep reading you'll figure out a little bit more but there is my my feeling about him is love my feeling about him is love and i see the ways in which because throughout the book i don't i don't include any story about anyone that's not completely germane to my journey because my journey is it's it's a hero's journey like it is not a sad story but what i needed to walk through to become myself was gnarly it was gnarly and there he is not there's nothing bad about him he's my choice he is who i chose we do what we want to do in august 1987 roughly two weeks before the premiere of dirty dancing jennifer and matthew were involved in a tragic car accident in northern ireland that took the lives of two women there were some very very heavy stuff that went down that changed my life forever and there was no one to blame and many people might think that they're gonna that i'm i'm here to you know tell some long-held secret none of that it's just we had an accident it was a pure and simple accident that was tragic and it had very serious uh traumatic lasting effects on i'm sure matthew and the family of the other women and me so we learn we know that this is now part of our story my story is different than matthew's and i love him today and the way i loved him is to me i don't know i just i have such fondness and warmth and yet at the same time told my story and owned my story as i remember it trying as hard as i could every page to be a just god of the page the title out of the corner is of course inspired by the iconic line from dirty dancing nobody puts baby in the corner so naturally jennifer shares many of her memories from the set of the surprise hit of 1987. making dirty dancing unless you were there you you can't even believe how much went wrong and how many things were just stacked against its success it was a tiny tiny micro budget movie before low budget movies were cool and we had this tiny budget and we had this sweet story and we went out there to shoot it it was supposed to be the summer but we couldn't afford to go there because the guests were there so we had to wait till the fall and then the leaves were changing and we were spray painting the leaves green because it was supposed to be summer and then it was freezing when we were in the lake and then i mean it was just every single thing that could go wrong went wrong and i think something really matt i don't think i have a very strong opinion about this from my experience growing up with watching my dad doing cabaret doing all sorts of any work that he does it's always fraught and when when a job is fraught and there are problems and you don't have money to fix everything it's very down and dirty and art is like that art is really necessity being the mother of invention and it brings out it's almost like things need to be so hot with anxiety and stress that it can mold the iron to be in a different configuration and that heat is creativity and when everybody's in it and everybody is barely surviving there's just a different energy and there is so much love on that movie but it was very very low expectations by the end despite those low expectations the film turned its modest six million dollar budget into nearly 215 million at the box office largely because of the on-screen chemistry between jennifer and her co-star patrick swayze but in her book jennifer reveals on set it was actually their animosity that made the movie work i was cast first and i thought the part of johnny castle was going to be some swarthy young latin new yorker dangerous type not this guy that i just did red dawn with from texas and who's you know was really bossy and played pranks and i just felt like he wasn't i was scared i was scared because i wanted it was my first lead and i wanted to make sure it was going to really work and i knew that i had no chemistry with him and i knew that i didn't really feel like he was my cup of tea and i just thought wow you know he's very attractive he's very talented but i'd had some funky times with him that were making me very very unsure if that was going to be a match don't put your heel down just stay on the toe and i wanted it to work and i wanted to have chemistry and i knew there was no chemistry between us but there was energy between us and i believe that energy especially if it's two intense people maybe even at odds with each other or something's up is hotter than two people who are just gaga for each other because the story worked us it was all working for us even though it felt like an obstacle out of the corner promises to be a beautiful close to the bone account of jennifer's life and writing such an intimate memoir could not have been easy but today she says the process has actually helped her become more comfortable in her own skin i believe that in writing the book i was able to really unpack all of the messages that i have either intuited or remember receiving about my worth i just have come to understand that who i am not who you think i am not what they say about me just who i am i have no question about it so i feel pretty good in the skin and that's not to say that that doesn't change as often as the weather it's not like i brushed my teeth and they stay brushed it's a daily practice too much time in my life in my opinion our world is spent criticizing and aiming for this perfection that is unattainable by anybody and if you get it for a second it's not sustainable because it's not real there's this perfection of imperfection which i have come to think of my whole book everything about this book launch that amount of pressure that everything has to be perfect and it has to be loved and no it's like everything else it just is and that's it

Channel: People

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Keywords: People, people magazine, news, celebrities, interview, magazine, celebrity news, celebrity, famous, Hollywood, celebrity (media genre), entertainment news, entertainment, patrick swayze, jennifer grey, jennifer grey interview, jennifer grey nose job, jennifer grey dirty dancing, jennifer grey and patrick swayze, jennifer grey on patrick swayze death, jennifer grey plastic surgery, jennifer grey 2022, dirty dancing

Id: L_TJEH4oG0A

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022