Director Rod Lurie made his leading lady blush when he told reporters that he had to use makeup to make Kate Beckinsdale look like she wasn't wearing makeup. In Nothing But the Truth, she plays a reporter who goes to jail to protect a source.

The film takes inspiration from the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame case but tells its own story about journalistic integrity. To research the part, Beckinsdale joined our ranks, for a brief time.

“I went to The LA Times and was allowed to follow around two female reporters there. They were really helpful. They were great and I got to sit in on their editorial meeting and take my little notes and it was really, really helpful. I mean, it’s helpful having Rod because Rod has a big experience of all that anyway, so he’s super accurate on that stuff. For me, I just wanted to talk about just the really prosaic stuff about what it’s like juggling being a woman and a mother and a reporter, and it’s really similar to being an actress. I was kind of bummed actually to find I didn't have to be such a chameleon to understand it because the similarities were quite intense.”

Maybe my female colleagues have a different perspective, but I sure don't feel like a movie star. Beckinsdale explained the similarities she perceived.

“From what I was talking to with the women at the LA Times, I think if you want to be an actor or you want to be a journalist it’s not just like, 'Oh I’ll fall in to it.' Like you really want to do it as a vocational job a lot of the time, for those two anyway it was. They spent a lot of their free time thinking about it. They don’t just punch their clock and go home and they never think about anything to do with the news ever again. They're absolutely thinking like that and on their evenings they're talking to their partner who's very often a journalist themselves. It’s like we go home and talk to our filmmaking husbands about our stuff.”

“Nothing But the Truth” opens on July 29 on theaters nationwide.