With Britney Spears‘ highly-anticipated memoir “The Woman in Me” gearing up for its Oct. 24 publication date, People magazine is running several excerpts from the book in which the music icon opens up about her conservatorship, acting career and more. Reflecting on her 2002 movie “Crossroads,” Spears noted “the experience wasn’t easy for me” as she unknowingly went Method for the role.
“My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind,” she writes. “I think I started Method acting — only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person. Some people do Method acting, but they’re usually aware of the fact that they’re doing it. But I didn’t have any separation at all. I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed ‘Crossroads.’ Still to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, She’s a little…quirky. If they thought that, they were right.”
Spears notes that “Crossroads” was “pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved.” She writes that she was a contender for the role of Allie opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook.” Rachel McAdams ended up winning the role, much to Spears’ relief. Had she taken the part, Spears would’ve been reunited with her former “Mickey Mouse Club” co-star Gosling.
“‘The Notebook’ casting came down to me and Rachel McAdams, and even though it would have been fun to reconnect with Ryan Gosling after our time on the ‘Mickey Mouse Club,’ I’m glad I didn’t do it,” Spears writes. “If I had, instead of working on my album ‘In the Zone’ I’d have been acting like a 1940s heiress day and night.”
“I imagine there are people in the acting field who have dealt with something like that, where they had trouble separating themselves from a character,” she continues. “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
As fans have long expected, Spears talks about her conservatorship aplenty in her memoir. The conservatorship was in its 13th year when Spears testified in court in June 2021 and accused her father and others of abuse. Her father was suspended as her conservator in September 2021 and the entire conservatorship ended in November.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” Spears writes in the book. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
“This is what’s hard to explain, how quickly I could vacillate between being a little girl and being a teenager and being a woman, because of the way they had robbed me of my freedom,” she continues. “There was no way to behave like an adult, since they wouldn’t treat me like an adult, so I would regress and act like a little girl; but then my adult self would step back in — only my world didn’t allow me to be an adult.”
Spears’ “The Woman in Me” is now available for pre-order. Head over to People magazine’s website to read more excerpts from the memoir.
