A woman looking sexy in gardening gloves: marriage material. Elizabeth Hurley looking sexy in a pair of gardening gloves: divorce-the-wife material. Lads, form an orderly queue. The lady herself is back, and when she’s not pottering around her plants, she’s bursting onto our screens with a lesbian kiss. Oh, and she’ll make you a bacon sarnie for brekkie…
Loaded last interviewed Elizabeth in 1994. Thirty years on, we share our relaunch anniversary with the release of her new movie, Strictly Confidential. Directed by her son Damian, the movie is filled with twists, turns and tiny two pieces from the Elizabeth Hurley Swim range that will have you fully perched on the edge of your seat.
The movie is beautifully shot. It’s exotic and erotic in equal measures. Not the stereotypical making of a mum-son duo. But to Elizabeth, it’s fully normal.
“I gave Damian a video camera for about his eighth birthday and he started to make mini movies literally then and there,” she tells me over a late evening Zoom call from her New York hotel. Strictly Confidential has just launched across the pond, and she’s on hand to promote it. “Damian was also writing scripts from a baby age,” she says. “He made every family vacation challenging for us because all he wanted to do was shoot movies and of course, that's my day job, so the last thing I wanted to do on holiday was get dressed in hair and makeup and and act for this despotic child who was handing me my lines and taking up my valuable vacation time.
“Nevertheless, we shot so many movies for him and I still have them on DVD. It felt like a natural progression for him to direct a real movie, even though he’s only 22, because he's done it for so long. I came in as a producer because I was nervous that he wouldn't quite get how evil my industry is and how tough you have to be, but he stayed so focused he even forgot to eat.”
Tossing aside the kid with the camcorder for just a second, it’s all about the 21-minute mark, the point in the movie at which Elizabeth, in a dress featuring a slit extending far beyond the upper-thigh, engages in girl-on-girl action with her co-star. The pair can be seen French kissing as breakthrough actress Pear Chiravara begins to peel the underwear from Elizabeth’s skin. All directed by…Damian Hurley, the innocent son, slash family holiday movie maker.
“Without a doubt, people have latched onto the scene where I kiss another woman,” says Elizabeth. “When you’re making a movie, you’re glad people are talking about it, but it’s not how the press portray it at all. For a start, I'm not the lead in the film, everybody's sort of 25 and under. We actually shot that scene super quickly because we just wanted to get through our checklist for the day.
“I play the mother of a girl who killed herself way before the movie starts.The story is really about a young girl, the best friend of the girl who's dead, who can't accept that her best friend would've killed herself, and she's looking for answers. She starts to uncover all these terrible secrets and betrayals, and she discovers that Rebecca’s mother too is guilty of betraying her daughter. Yes, the kiss is a very integral part of the plot, but it's actually quite a small part of the story.”
Okay… kid writes movie. Mum gets written in. Mum is directed to kiss another woman. How does that all happen so naturally?
“Damian made his first short film, which I was in, and someone at Lionsgate said, ‘This kid's got a lot of talent, let him write a movie and if we like it, we'll make it’,” says Elizabeth. “And so, Strictly Confidential was born. He had a friend who committed suicide when he was 17, and he'd written the treatment but hadn't done anything else with it. When Damian got the call from Lionsgate, he decided to see if he could really develop this story. We agreed he should go away and write his first draft with no interference from me, then we started to edit the script together and change things. The biggest change of all came about because my character was originally a man who had flashbacks to his dead wife (whom I’d agreed to play). But Damian decided to change the gender, so that instead of Rebecca's father still being alive, it was her mother and therefore her mother was the one having an affair with one of her female friends. I agreed. It was so much more startling to read than her dad having a fling with a young woman. It was clever of Damian, because it’s not that we would like to think that middle-aged men are running off with young women having affairs, but they do sometimes. Hopefully not all men! But for a middle-aged woman to do it, it's something completely different. It totally changed the way you looked at the story.”
The kissing scene is about as sexy as it gets. But Elizabeth insists she’s not the main event.
“There are so many montage shots of girls in beautiful bikinis walking along a white beach,” she says. “In fact, I'm going to make an Instagram post saying, ‘Look how often I got my swimwear into the movie’, because there's a lot of it in there. And yeah, I wear it too. Wearing my own brand was obviously just me pulling strings as a producer. Damian was like, ‘I want the girls in white’. I was never going to sanction buying the competitors' bikinis, so it was obvious they were going to be wearing mine. And the girls are amazing in them. The film looks lush, expensive and beautiful. Damien is passionate about light and how he can play with the light. It was important for us that the girls felt really beautiful and fabulous.”
How to look that flippin’ amazing in your 50s…green juice at 5am?
“Working for Estee Lauder for nearly 30 years has meant that I’ve had my mitts on some really good skincare,” says Elizabeth. “I haven't bought makeup, fragrance or skincare for 29 years. My bathroom does look like the cosmetics department of Harrods. I do have beautiful stuff at my fingertips and I really try to avoid sun damage, which I can't stress enough for anybody reading this. I can't tell you how many of my friends now in their 50s are having bits of their skin cut away from skin cancer.
“I get up very early because I'm a lark. But I have never had an ice bath in my life and I do not drink green juices. I take care of my health, but in a really normal way. I definitely have bacon sandwiches, but I make the bread myself. I make bread every single day because I have this obsession with not eating ultra-processed food. I eat a lot of food, but it's really good food. I definitely have a bacon sandwich a couple of times a week. I drink coffee, I put my bread maker on and I go out with the dogs in my trackies, very scruffy hair and a lot of moisturiser and run around with the dogs. I don't go to the gym and I don't run, but I stride out with the dogs, normally with a garden implement in my hand, or a strimmer. I do masses of gardening. I love gardening more than anything in the world, which nobody would've known, but I really like that. I'm very fit and active. I don't go to the gym or actually do any exercise, but I don't really sit still very much either. I eat whatever I like at my meals, but I don’t eat anything in between them. I have three meals a day, or four if I have to go out for a late dinner. For me, snacking, even if it's healthy, doesn't work at all.”
So now that she’s snogged another woman at his command, does Elizabeth still share the same relationship with her son?
“It's not exactly the same actually, because I’ve seen the parts of me I’ve passed on to Damian,” she says. “Having made a billion mistakes in my life and having been a complete idiot many, many times, the thing that I don't beat myself up for is that I know that I've worked incredibly hard and that I'm very tenacious and I don't give up easily. And I have seen both those things in my son over the last 18 months. You can't make someone be a fighter. They're either a fighter or they're not. And we need gentle souls on this earth in the same way that we need aggressive fighters. I happen to be a fighter.”
Elizabeth shares a teeny tiny bit of her very personal personal life, and reveals she might let her son dress her for a date. Move over Donatella Versace!
“I'm not married and I'm not cohabiting and beyond that, I’d say that my relationship with Damian has matured since shooting the movie, and I would definitely consider introducing someone to him,” she says. “I would absolutely not go on a double date with Damien, but I would take fashion advice from him.
“There was a time where because I was a single mom with a single child, that I would've been fairly reluctant to bring someone into our fold. The balance never felt right for me to bring someone into our small circle because I wanted to give my love and my focus to Damien at all times. I thought he deserved it. He'd had lots of things to deal with in his life and I wanted him to have one constant that wasn't going to get taken away and wasn't going to change. Now, he's a grown up. He's proving himself as an adult, and I know now that I could definitely introduce someone who took a more integral part within our family circle, rather than keeping my love life separate. I didn't make a movie for seven years when he was born, I wanted to be at home with him to do the school runs and make his porridge. I don't regret that, but who knows, maybe going forward we'll be having more blended families.”
Could that empty seat at Elizabeth’s table already be taken? We’ve got a sneaking suspicion…
Photo Credits:
Photographer: Antoine Verglas
Hair: Serge Normant
Make up: Sandy Linter
Styling: Freddie Leiba