A wave of nostalgia! The beloved surfer girl flick Blue Crush hit theaters on August 16, 2002, marking Kate Bosworth’s first major role.
“It was so intense and overwhelming,” the actress and model said of her sudden rise to fame during a June 2021 appearance on the “Ladies First With Laura Brown” podcast.
“It was a really, really hard time, and I did not know how to handle that at all. And I also did not know how to really communicate through that very well to support systems or to my friends or family,” Bosworth continued, revealing that she lost “a lot of weight” at the time due to being under “a lot of scrutiny.”
Despite the difficult period after the film first premiered, the California native thinks a Blue Crush sequel is a great idea. “Sanoe [Lake], Michelle [Rodriguez] and I always talk about it. We would love to make it happen,” she told Entertainment Tonight in May 2022.
“There are still a few waves that the world is still unwelcoming to women surfing them. I think it would be great to see another location in the world and bringing the girls to a wave that otherwise is male dominated,” the I-Land star added.
The sports movie, based on Susan Orlean’s 1998 Outside magazine article “Life’s Swell,” follows three friends out to prove that there’s a place for women in the world of competitive surfing. Shot in Oahu, Hawaii, the film featured cameos from real life pro surfers including Megan Abubo, Rochelle Ballard, Layne Benchley, Keala Kennelly and Kate Skarratt.
The director, John Stockwell, told IGN in August 2002 that he “originally aspired to cast only surfers.” Although Bosworth was an actress rather than an athlete, she didn’t disappoint.
“She was crazy. Fearless. She’s insane,” Stockwell told the outlet of the Blue Crush star. “She went out on days where a guy would get paralyzed at the Pipeline, then she’d paddle out five minutes later. She wasn’t a diva. I don’t know what it is. She never really got hurt. I don’t think she ever quite realized the danger she got herself into.”
The Top Gun actor added that he wanted to make a movie about female surfers to counter the sexism he’d observed in the sport. “It’s incredibly misogynistic. Even shooting on the North Shore, members of our own crew were like, ‘Girls can’t surf pipe, girls shouldn’t be out there. Why don’t you do a guy surfer movie?’”
Scroll through to see what Bosworth and her Blue Crush costars are doing now, 20 years after their characters proved the boys wrong:
