Ashley Judd’s perspective on her 1997 movie Kiss the Girls has changed over the years.
“Thank you for loving the movie, for loving Kate, and for making that film such a pivotal — really transformative — moment in my career. It opened big in the spring of 1997, when the daffodils were blooming in North Carolina, and it changed the trajectory of my life as an actor,” Judd, 57, wrote in the caption of an Instagram post on Sunday, March 8. “There are so many good memories from that time.”
Kiss the Girls, adapted from James Patterson’s 1995 novel of the same name, starred Morgan Freeman as forensic psychologist Alex Cross, who discovers that his niece has gone missing and believes that she was kidnapped by a serial killer. Judd played Dr. Kate McTiernan, who was also taken by the criminal.
The film grossed $60 million worldwide on a budget under $30 million, making it a box office hit.
Judd said on Sunday that her “relationship” to Kiss the Girls has “evolved” in the years since the movie’s release.
“Kiss the Girls centers on male sexual violence and the torture of women’s bodies. At the time, we often framed stories like this around female resilience — the strength of surviving. Many people still say that’s what the film means to them,” the Heat star continued. “But I’ve found myself asking a different question: Why is sexual terror against women something we package as entertainment? Why is it profitable? … What does it mean that we celebrate resilience, but rarely interrogate the violence that made resilience necessary in the first place?”
Judd concluded, “So today I hold Kiss the Girls in a more complicated way — with gratitude for what it meant in my life and career, affection for the people I worked with, and curiosity about what the story represents in our culture. Growing up sometimes means learning to hold things with a little more perspective.”
Judd made similar comments in a video accompanying the post, first sharing some of her favorite memories from filming before sharing her current thoughts on Kiss the Girls.
“I invite you to consider for yourself, it’s OK to love the movie and come up to me and say it’s your favorite movie,” she told viewers, later adding, “To me, this is not entertainment. It’s collective denial, minimizing and the normalization and codification and institutionalization and culturalization and socialization and making entertainment out of terror, out of sexual terror.”
