Looking back now, Jamie Lynn Sigler can name one project she wishes she had walked away from, but not the moment she finally stood up for herself.
“I had to take it out of [my memoir] because it was just too long, but I wrote a lot about when I played Heidi Fleiss,” Sigler, 44, exclusively shares in Us Weekly’s latest cover story. “I had a long chapter about that and how much of a bad experience that was for me.”
Sigler, whose memoir And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope is out May 5, explains that it was “a very fragile time” for her. (The TV movie Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss, which chronicled the life of the infamous Hollywood madam, was released in 2004.)
“I was 21 years old. I had two weeks notice [and] I was sent to this weight loss doctor to lose all this weight super fast to be super skinny like Heidi,” she says. “I had to do a lot of sex scenes as Heidi because she was a prostitute prior.”
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Sigler claims that “there was no care” for her on the set, adding she felt like “there was no regard for my comfortability and my safety.”
“There was a scene where the camera kept getting it wrong, and I was topless on top of this man that I had met five minutes prior, and they couldn’t get it right,” Sigler says. “I never stood up for myself on set. I remember looking at my dresser, and she was like my person on set and she just shook her head ‘no.’ And I remember I got off this man [and] I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I turned around. I said, ‘I will not come back here until you fix this.’”
She continues, “The tears [were] just pouring down my face [and I said], ‘Until you fix this camera and figure out what’s going on, I will not come back into this room. And it was very scary for me to stand up for myself and very out of character, but I was so uncomfortable.”
“I’ve had great experiences, bad experiences, and then some that I wish, maybe in hindsight, that I didn’t do that movie,” she says.
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In stark contrast to the Fleiss role, Sigler felt like she was “held with such care and respect” on set of The Sopranos while filming her first sex scene in season 3.
“I was the kid, even though I was 19. They met me when I was 16. I was everyone’s little girl. So, I appreciated the wardrobe department trying to break the ice by putting in all these titty tassels and thongs in my dressing room to sort of loosen the mood,” she recalls. “But I was held with such care and respect, like I always was.”
She continues, “They closed the set. It was my favorite director, Allen Coulter. He assured me with our first [assistant director] Michael [DeCasper] that it would just be the two of them and the cameraman in the room. The [actor] I worked with, Patrick [Tully], was so gentle and loving. It made me feel so safe that I was able to actually be as vulnerable and scared as Meadow was in that moment.
“Patrick was very respectful, like, ‘Can I put my hand here?’” she shares. “It’s very vivid because obviously it’s a huge moment. I can still remember it like it was yesterday. There was not one moment that I felt uncomfortable.”
For more on Sigler, watch the exclusive video above and pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly — on newsstands now.
