LeAnn Rimes says walking onto the set of Coyote Ugly ‘was my introduction into sexuality’

Unbelievably, it’s been a full 20 years since the raucous girl power film Coyote Ugly hit movie theaters. 

And to mark the occasion, singer LeAnn Rimes is reminiscing about the experience of helping to make the movie, for which she contributed four songs and appeared in the climax.

In a chat with Entertainment Tonight, the country star, 38, went so far as to say that walking onto the film set – when she was all of 17 years old – served as a fast-track ‘introduction into sexuality’.

‘I was 17. I was… this little sweet innocent girl and then… I walk on set and they hand me these chicken cutlets to put in my bra and they’re like, “Push ’em up”‘ she said of the experience. 

‘That was my introduction into sexuality and being sexualized as a woman,’ Rimes recalled about the Tyra Banks- and Bridget Moynahan-starring film. 

‘It was interesting. It was quite a shock to the system. I was a kid looking at these women going, “I’ll just do what she’s doing.” Nothing was really embodied,’ LeAnn said of her performance at the time.

She continued: ‘I was trying to be this sexy singer performing on a bar, and that was so opposite of me. I was really acting at the time ’cause I was still figuring all that out about myself. 

However, ‘now, if you put me on a bar, it’s a different story… Now with all of my music, there’s so much more of an embodied experience since I’ve lived these songs. I’m 38 now and it comes from a completely different place… I draw from my own life experiences.’

And even though the Coyote Ugly experience was ‘quite a shock to the system’ as she put it, LeAnn doesn’t look back on that time in a negative light.

In fact, she thinks the timing of it was ‘appropriate.’

‘They wanted to keep my image so innocent up until that point,’ the Grammy winner said of her handlers at the time. ‘I was kinda like, “Ta da” – the chains being broken off of a teenage girl. It was appropriate.’

The film, and particularly the hit single Can’t Fight The Moonlight off of its soundtrack, put Rimes on the map in a major way.

And now that two decades have passed since Coyote Ugly’s release, Rimes is marking the occasion with a MegaMix release of the four songs she recorded for the film’s soundtrack. 

‘The music really has seemed to stick with people for all this time, and they passed it down to their daughters,’ she remarked. 

‘There’s just something about it. So it’s nice to be able to take the four songs that I did for the film and really re-release this as a MegaMix, as a dance mix, to give even more attitude than it did the first time around.’