It seems like a good thing that this summer's modern retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" ditched the "beauty" from the title and focused on the "beast," because leading lady Vanessa Hudgens said she went out of her way to avoid making her character Lindy look outwardly beautiful.
"I made a point to not look put-together," she said. "On the first day of shooting, I would not stop fidgeting with my hair. I was trying to make it look messier and messier and messier and messier!"
July 30's "Beastly" has changed some of the conventions of the original fairy tale for today's world, but the idea of the "Beast" taking a while to see the "Beauty" is not one of them. If you think back to the classic Disney version, Belle — the Lindy equivalent — was attractive yet bookish and a little bizarre. However, being stuck in a castle for a while with The Beast made him see that she truly was a beautiful person. Vanessa said it similarly takes the film's "Beast" Kyle Kingston (Alex Pettyfer) a little while to see Lindy's true beauty.
"In this, I'm kind of just the girl that doesn't fit in," Vanessa said about Lindy. "She's very artsy. She used to take care of herself, [but] because of the situation that she's in ... her dad is actually a drug addict, so she has to take care of him and go through all of that crap."
Clearly this makes the problems in Lindy's home life a bit more serious, but we like the idea of "Beastly" being significantly darker than the story's previous incarnations. As for Vanessa, she is happy to once again not be forced to play the classically beautiful girl.
"I don't think I really have played the pretty, I guess, bitchy girl," she said. "In 'High School Musical,' I was supposed to be the brainiac; in 'Bandslam,' I'm supposed to be goth-girl-ish."
Are you excited that "Beastly" is going to be downplaying Vanessa's obvious beauty to emphasize that true beauty comes from the inside?
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