Jessica attended the premiere of  “Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro” at the Tribeca Grand Hotel in New York City.

While climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, as part of Kenna’s “Summit on the Summit” mission, Jessica Biel got to know the 19,000-odd feet of rock pretty well. In fact, she’s pretty sure the mountain is actually a woman.
She was like this mysterious, foreboding, ominous woman. And she was hidden almost all day long, and just when you were unmotivated, and feeling like crap and uninspired and thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ the clouds would part and she would peek out, and the beauty would strike you, and then you’d be inspired again,” Biel told MTV News on the red carpet for the premiere of “Summit.” “And she was literally, like, this woman who would pull this veil over her face and disappear, and then she’d show a little bit of herself, and then she’d disappear again. It was kind of this running joke, but I really felt that way. I felt like, ‘I respect you. Please let me get up, please.”

But just because Kilimanjaro was inspiring doesn’t mean she also couldn’t be positively dominating too. In the film — which debuts Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on MTV — Biel and her fellow climbers (a team that also featured Lupe Fiasco, Santigold, Emile Hirsch and a team of scientists, United Nations ambassadors and experienced mountain guides) were brutalized by freezing rain and snow, gashed and twisted on stones and dizzied by the rapidly thinning atmospheric conditions. But that was just the physical trauma. The real challenge, for Biel at least, was overcoming the mental aspects of scaling the peak.

“It was a combination of the mental and the psychological aspects of the mountain, of the slow-but-steady pace that you had to go up it, and that sometimes made your brain just want to explode, because you just wanted to get there so badly,” she said. “And then you couldn’t see anything at night, when we were doing our ascent attempt, and you start thinking that it would never end and you’d start to think, ‘Why am I here? This is miserable!’

“But then you’d get this rush of inspiration of ‘I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for something bigger than me, for people who don’t have a voice, for people that need water around the world,’ and then you’d power through,” she continued. “Your mind started to play tricks on you. And then, with the altitude, you just felt so strange. You didn’t know why you were lethargic, you didn’t know why you were so tired. It was an intense experience.”

And that bigger goal was to raise awareness about the global clean-water crisis, a problem much bigger than any mountain. But Biel was inspired, not just by her trip to the top of the world, but by the larger message the mission carries: that together, people can conquer even the most insurmountable of challenges.

“That’s a part of all movements. One voice is something, but a group of voices can change the world. All grassroots movements started that way, and with the Internet and people following us and watching our ascent, it really feels like people were excited by what we were doing and hopefully were inspired to create challenges for themselves, whatever that may be, and for whatever cause that may be,” Biel said. “To get involved with their community, or pick something around the world that they care about, that they feel they should stand up for. That was the idea behind this. Kenna wasn’t going to stop, because he had this group of friends behind him, who were supporting him. And I wasn’t going to stop, because I wanted to be there for Kenna, and I didn’t want to take the group down. It was such a group mentality, and I don’t think we could’ve done it without everyone being there, and 100-percent ready for the challenge.”

“Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro” doesn’t premiere on MTV until Sunday at 9 p.m. ET, but you can get a sneak peek of the documentary, which follows Kenna and his team’s treacherous trek up Africa’s highest mountain, right now.

During the ascent, things got a little rough, with the climbers braving brutal weather, thinning atmosphere, and dizzying nausea. At one point in the film, Biel explains how the mountain has a way of making even the most brazen climber humble.

“I was sort of irritated that we were stopping so much, I said to one of our guides, ‘Can we go a little faster?’ ” she says. “And then I got a little bit irritated, and I started going down this little area, kind of pissed off, and then I immediately got nausea. The mountain was like, ‘Don’t disrespect me.’ “

Before making the final ascent of the peak, climbers rested at Kosovo Camp, a clearing some 16,000 feet above sea level. Everyone was tired and hurting, but the lure of reaching the top of the mountain was strong, as Lupe Fiasco says during the film.

“Everybody has a different set of variables that affect them on the climb, whether it be what they wear, what they eat, when they go to the bathroom, how much they drink,” he laughed. “There’s an 80 percent chance that you’re going to be uncomfortable. So you kind of have to rewire everything into being comfortable with being uncomfortable … [you have to] overcome yourself to overcome the environment. Because you can’t really fight against nature, nature’s going to happen regardless.”

And while confidence was high, Kenna was still wary. He knew the toughest part of the trip still lay before them — the 3,000-foot climb to the summit — and he was trying to prepare himself mentally. After all, he had been to Kosovo Camp once before, five years ago, and the conditions proved too tough for him to continue on. This time, he promised things will be different.

“You can only be so confident. This mountain has its own mind, and I’ll be lucky if I get to the top, I’ll be thankful if I get to the top, but I’m not underestimating what’s ahead of us,” he says. “I’m worried, because people are sick, people have knee problems, people are cold, it’s all mental at this point. I don’t know how well people are going to be able to pull it off, considering they’ve never done it before. Last time I was here, that’s what happened to me. It wasn’t that I was sick, but I could’ve been more focused, and allowed myself to be sick until I got there. So, I’ve charged my brain this time, if I vomit or if I trip or if I have frozen toes and feet when I come off and I have to get ‘em amputated, I’m going.”

Don’t miss “Summit on the Summit: Kilimanjaro,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on MTV.

Jessica and Justin spent some days in Switzerland. They had fun in the snow together This is very cute! Be sure to check the pictures on the gallery!

ComingSoon.net has learned that Jessica Biel may be in talks to co-star with Richard Gere in Garry Marshall’s remake of Frank Capra’s 1948 political drama State of the Union about a businessman who must reunite with his estranged wife in order to improve his campaign run for the President of the United States. It would reunite Biel with the director of her recent romantic comedy hit Valentine’s Day.

Capra’s film, which originally starred Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, has been adapted with a new screenplay by Rod Lurie, who has more than a little experience with the subject of political campaigning from his 2000 film The Contender and the television drama “Commander in Chief” starring Geena Davis. Richard Gere has been attached to play the lead role for some time with Annette Bening’s name having been mentioned to play his wife.

As of yet, nothing has been confirmed including whether Marshall will make State of the Union his next project following the hit Valentine’s Day. So far, they also haven’t set up any sort of distribution deal though we can expect that to change once everything else falls into place.

This is my video to Jessica haha you will be surprised in the end!

And this other one was made by facingwindows:

You can leave your birthday message at her MTDN profile.

Patti LuPone, Jessica Biel, Sherie Rene Scott, Paulo Szot and Oscar Isaac are among the thesps lined up to participate in next week’s reading of the Lincoln Center Theater tuner “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”

Chita Rivera also was said to be in the mix, although she’s no longer participating the multi-day developmental session.

Cast list is set for the reading only and not for the show’s upcoming Broadway preem, which LCT will produce at the Belasco Theater in a run that begins previews in October.

Biel and Szot were in a prior reading last year of “Women on the Verge,” along with thesps including Salma Hayek and Matthew Morrison.

LuPone, most recently on the Rialto in her Tony-winning turn in “Gypsy,” reps the addition of a full-scale diva to the femme-centric cast. The last Gotham stage outing for Scott (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) was a well-received Off Broadway run of her solo show, “Everyday Rapture.”

Adapted from the 1988 Pedro Almodovar pic by the “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” duo of composer-lyricist David Yazbek and book writer Jeffrey Lane, “Women on the Verge” follows the intersecting lives of a group of women living in Madrid. Bartlett Sher, who helmed long-running LCT hit “South Pacific,” directs the stage incarnation.

Rehearsal for the reading of “Women” begins March 4.

Source: Variety.com

The gallery has new candids, Jessica and Justin leaving their apartment this morning and another set with Jessica in Tribeca with a friend.

Gallery Links:

Feb 20 – Jessica has lunch with a friend

Feb 20 – Jessica and Justin leaving their apartment

]]> http://jess-biel.com/2010/02/20/new-candids-jessica-out-in-ny-today/feed/ 0 http://jess-biel.com/2010/02/19/william-rast-rocks-fashion-week/ http://jess-biel.com/2010/02/19/william-rast-rocks-fashion-week/#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:30:31 +0000 Ang http://jess-biel.com/?p=887

The Oscar de la Renta show on Manhattan’s Upper East Side yesterday drew all of fashion’s biggest names, but the star of the always elegant affair was the lovely Jessica Biel. The actress has been a fan of the designer for years, wearing his dresses to last year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party, her Easy Virtue premiere at the Rome Film Festival, and the recent Los Angeles premiere of her new flick Valentine’s Day.

Arriving about 20 minutes late—that would be, fashionably—Biel sat next to Vanity Fair’s Michael Roberts and her stylist, Estee Stanley, whose impressive client list also includes Penelope Cruz, Mandy Moore, and Amy Adams. After the show, Stanley remarked that she and Biel loved just about everything in the collection. “I was like, ‘Jess, you are wearing that, and that, and that,” she said, recounting the many impressive looks de la Renta managed to send down the runway. Discussing the tastemaker’s Fashion Week schedule, which included a jaunt to last night’s William Rast show (Biel’s longtime boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, co-founded the clothing company), I remarked that it must be difficult to attend the events while also securing her clients’ looks for the Academy Awards. Stanley replied that her life gets a whole lot easier “when there is a collection like that,” which might be stylist code for “someone might be wearing Oscar to the Oscars.”

Source: VanityFair.com