Her 40-pound weight loss isn't -- insists Nia Vardalos -- some diabolical plan to land herself in the pages of People magazine, amid Valerie Bertinelli, Melissa Joan Hart and myriad new celebrity mothers proving their moral and genetic superiority by dropping their baby weight within days of giving birth.
"I find it strange being mentioned as some sort of accomplishment or triumph," says Vardalos, the unlikely writer-star of the unlikely box-office smash of 2002, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." It's only weight loss, after all, not curing cancer, and the only reason she bothered was because "I had to. I had a blood sugar issue," as well as thyroid disease, and diabetes in her family tree, and so her doctor insisted. "To be told you have to do something, what a bummer," she says.
It's clear that Vardalos doesn't like being told what to do or adhering to some Hollywood conventions. This is the woman who wrote her own ticket into Hollywood, after being infamously told by an agent that she wasn't pretty enough to be a leading lady or fat enough to be a character actress.
"I'm like this every woman in terms of my looks," Vardalos says over a glass of iced tea at L'Hermitage. "I had to write my scripts in the first place because I don't look like Nicole Kidman. I continue to write parts I want to play."
In person, the actress radiates a kind of sunny, albeit definitely determined, optimism. She wears white jeans, a loose black, print top, and her hair tucked up under a jaunty cap. Her skin looks particularly radiant and tawny, though she points out the zit on the top of her forehead. Her laugh is ready and enveloping.
At 46, Vardalos returns to the screen this summer after a three-year absence, with two romantic comedies. In "My Life in Ruins" (in theaters Friday), Vardalos plays a burned-out tour guide, resigned to a bus trip from hell around Greece with a disparate bunch of tourists, who falls for a Greek bus driver. In "I Hate Valentine's Day" (July 3), which she also wrote and directed, she stars as a snappy, commitment-phobic florist who will date men only five times before a mandated breakup, a plan that goes awry when John Corbett (her "Greek Wedding" costar) opens a restaurant on her street.
As she notes, "In the movies, you often see the average-looking guy with the incredibly attractive woman. In my movies you see the average-looking woman with the super hot John Corbett. I'm happy to make those movies for all of us women. Guess what? We need people like me on screen. That's what movies are. You go and escape for a sec."
