The role that made Kate Bosworth a breakout star was one she almost didn't get.
Of all the films you could associate the longtime actress with, it's likely Blue Crush, the 2002 surf movie that ultimately became a box office hit and officially put Bosworth on the Hollywood map. However, as she recently revealed on Sophia Bush's podcast, Work in Progress, it was a role that nearly went to someone else.
"Six months of living in LA, this script called Blue Crush came to me and I had never touched a surfboard in my life, but I knew that girl through and through," Bosworth recalled. "I knew what it was like to love something so deeply and to want something so badly and to have the kind of grit and determination that this girl had and the vulnerability and the fear and the doubt and the self-doubt—all the things that I was experiencing in that moment was crossing over with this character." At the time, she was an aspiring young actress auditioning daily with only a handful of acting credits to her name.
"Every cell in my body said you are this person, you're gonna get this role," she said.
Bosworth ended up auditioning and going on two callbacks, but after the third time, she was served a devastating blow: she was not going to be cast because she did not know how to surf and that was a prerequisite for the role.
"I just thought, 'No, I wont accept that,'" Bosworth recalled to Bush. So, as the film team spent three weeks auditioning surfers, Bosworth rang up a surf instructor and spent that entire time learning how in Malibu. By the end, she called the director and producer and asked if they could come watch her surf.
However, it didn't go exactly as she had hoped. "I just ate it so bad over and over and over and over for hours—just awful, just unsurfable, horrible mess I was," Bosworth described.
Fortunately, her determination did not go unnoticed. After she left, Bosworth said one of the producers asked their surf instructor if they thought she could pull it off.
"The surf instructor looked at him and said, 'I can guarantee you one thing—you will not meet someone more determined,'" she recalled. "And that's literally how I got that role."