Inside Out(39)

If all this obsessing about my body sounds crazy to you, you’re not wrong: eating disorders are crazy, they are a sickness. But that doesn’t make them less real. When you are afflicted with a disease, you can’t just decide not to have it, no matter how miserable it’s making you.


I THINK VERY few people who aren’t athletes or members of the military themselves can truly grasp what I went through to transform myself to star in G.I. Jane. It is the film I am most proud of, because it was the hardest for me to make—emotionally, physically, and mentally—and I had to commit to the part as much as I imagined my character, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, was committed to becoming the first female Navy SEAL.

I was completely taken with the story: Lt. O’Neil is set up by a female U.S. senator to be the first woman to go through Navy SEAL training, but she has no idea that the senator is using her as a bargaining chip—and fully expects her to fail. O’Neil is beaten up, ridiculed, and nearly drowned, but against all odds she succeeds. That grit, that absolute refusal to go down, despite everything she’s up against, spoke to me.

It was also a timely subject: the issue of women in combat was a hot topic following the Gulf War. By law, women were not allowed in combat, but in contemporary warfare, there was really no such thing as a front line. Women weren’t safe anywhere in war, but neither did they have the same opportunities as men to advance in their respective services. The Navy and the Air Force went “coed” in 1993, but the Army and Marine Corps held firm on the combat exclusion for women, as did elite units like the Navy SEALs, maintaining that women could simply never be as strong as men.

Getting in shape for the Navy’s most punishing physical trial gave a new definition to the word extreme. If I was going to be realistic in the part, I knew I had to go through whatever physical challenges Lt. O’Neil would. They put us through a two-week modified SEAL training, and it was just forty guys and me. On the first morning, I woke up at five a.m., took a handful of vitamins, and then they had us run a timed mile. I promptly threw up. By the end of the day, I had horrendous blisters from my boots and could barely walk. One of our SEAL consultants on the film, Harry Humphries, took me aside and said quietly, “Listen, you don’t have to do all of this.” I thought, I’m playing an officer. A leader. If I stop now, I’ll never get anyone’s respect. I told Harry just to get me some tape for my feet.

It was hard-core. Sam Rockwell was on that film initially, but he didn’t make it through the training—he told Carson Daly years later that he was afraid he was going to get sick filming the scuba scenes at night in the frigid water.

On my second day, I was a few minutes late to the training session. The guys were already in formation, and I tried to sneak in at the back of the line unnoticed. “Jordan! Front and center,” screamed one of our SEAL team commanders. (They never called me by my real name when we were training.) I ran up in front of him, and as I stood there he yelled, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Drop your fucking ass down.” Which means lean and rest: get in a push-up position and hold it. And everyone else was forced to do the same. By the end of that training, though, I was tougher than most of the guys. He’d yell at them, “Are you gonna let yourself get beat by some mother of three?”

The only strength difference between the guys and me by the end was that I could never, ever, get past three pull-ups—four tops. That was the bane of my training existence. No matter how ripped I got, I actually had to cheat on-screen with those. I did my two or three and sometimes I even needed a little help to really nail those.

I finagled a meeting with a high-ranking admiral in Coronado as part of my research, and he confirmed that the only physical difference between men and women candidates for the Navy SEALs would come down to upper-body strength. “Other than that,” he told me, “it’s purely mental.” Our conversation gave me a defining clarity on what I needed to bring to the character of Lt. O’Neil. I could portray her physical strength, but in the end, what was even more important was having the mental resilience to stick with it, no matter what.

I needed that fortitude when we started filming. It was physically and mentally grueling, especially the scene in which O’Neil is one of the SEAL candidates “captured” by a simulated enemy, and, as prisoners of war, they learn SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. In the Resistance segment, the captives are tortured to extract information, and I had to engage in a brutal fight with the master chief, played brilliantly by Viggo Mortensen, who in addition to pretending to be an enemy has always been anti-woman, and is trying to show the male candidates what a liability and a danger a female would be on the battlefield. He forced my head underwater and kept it down almost as long as I could hold my breath, then let me come up for a gulp of air before slamming my head back under. It was so realistic, one of the assistant directors was worried I’d drown. Honestly, there were moments when I was afraid of that myself.


RECENTLY, I CAME across a column the beloved movie critic Roger Ebert wrote after an advance screening of G.I. Jane. It was, he observed, “intriguing to watch her work with the image of her body. The famous pregnant photos on the cover of Vanity Fair can be placed beside her stripper in Striptease, her executive in Disclosure and the woman in Indecent Proposal who has to decide what a million dollars might purchase; all of these women, and now O’Neil, test the tension between a woman’s body and a woman’s ambition and will. G.I. Jane does it most obviously, and effectively.” It was gratifying to see that someone as smart as Ebert got it.