Katherine Heigl starred in Knocked Up and called it:

“a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”

via Vanity Fair, January 2008: Katherine Heigl press release | vanityfair.com.

To balance out the suffering she endured on Knocked Up and the punishment of being on the hit show Grey’s Anatomy, she took an empowering role as a stiff woman in The Ugly Truth opposite a chauvinist ex-Spartan

Katherine Heigl’s history of making ill-advised, self-aggrandizing comments in public has made her a figure of scorn, which is too bad, because Heigl actually has a winning screen presence. But she doesn’t make it any easier on herself when she stars in witless, regressive chick-flicks like The Ugly Truth, in which she plays a career woman too fussy to achieve her true purpose in life: landing a man. Gerard Butler plays the loutish self-help guru who helps Heigl tap into her inner sex goddess, but nothing about their boy-meets/loses/etc.-girl story has anything to do with how actual grown-ups behave. Like too many romantic comedies these days, The Ugly Truth is about the irritating quirks and shallow goals of stock characters.

via The 19-plus worst films of 2009 | Film | Best of | The A.V. Club.