Heather Graham has had “problems” picking men. It’s one reason she wanted to “make fun” of herself in her new movie, Chosen Family.
The 54-year-old actress knows people might take one look at her and assume she’s lucky in love, but in reality, Graham tells Yahoo Entertainment, her personal life has been a bit more chaotic.
“I wanted to explore the theme that if there’s dysfunctional things in your family that sometimes you end up dating people that have dysfunctional things as well. That you can unconsciously gravitate toward these dynamics that you don’t like. I wanted to explore that … because I have done them,” Graham, who has been estranged from her parents for almost 30 years, says about her second directorial feature.
In the film, Graham stars as Ann, a yoga teacher with a rough dating track record thanks to her manic family and inability to say no. When a possible new love walks into her life, she relies on her friends to help her navigate the complicated situation.
Graham breaks down some of her real-life exes like this in the film’s press notes: “a club owner who lived in a house full of models, a guy who had intense temper tantrums once or twice a week, one who lived with his ex-girlfriend, a guy who ended up in a mental institution after he went into a bar waving a toy gun, a super-jealous guy who read all my text messages, a guy who freaked out when he lost a pumpkin-carving contest and a guy who wouldn’t cop to wearing a toupee.”
“I definitely think I have problems with my picker,” she tells Yahoo. Although Graham — who’s been linked to actors like Heath Ledger and Josh Lucas — wouldn’t name names, she says it wasn’t all bad while dating in Hollywood.
“I got to date a lot of cool, great guys,” she says. “I just think that my family was screwed up. I would gravitate toward kind of screwed-up people and try to fix them, which is not a recipe for success.” (The actress has been dating snowboarder John de Neufville since 2022.)
After hits like Boogie Nights and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Graham was labeled a sex symbol in the ’90s and early ‘aughts. When asked if that was a blessing or curse in her personal life, she laughs: “It’s funny because I do sometimes look at pictures of myself and go, ‘Why did I settle for dating [that guy]?”
Graham believes “the culture” has shifted around how female sex symbols are talked about.
“I do feel like, especially in that time period — and I can see it in my contemporaries, you look at someone like Pamela Anderson — if you were a sexy woman it felt like people then wanted to say something mean about you,” she says.
Graham says men were never judged as “harshly” if they were viewed as sexy. But if you were “a sexy woman” it felt as if people were looking for a way to “criticize you.”
“It feels like a woman can be sexy, and now we don’t also have to find something wrong with her to criticize,” the actress adds.
Chosen Family tells the story of family, friends and relationships through a female lens — with female director Graham at the helm. She blames “sexism” and “patriarchy” for the entertainment industry’s long delay in realizing there is an audience craving these kinds of projects.
“Hopefully things are changing, but it’s changing slowly,” she says. “And I do think there’s a huge market of women out there, including me, that want to watch this kind of content.”
Chosen Family is in theaters and on demand Friday, Oct. 11.
