It's been a year since EmRata parlayed a one-day gig on a Robin Thicke video into worldwide mega-bombshell status, and she would like to thank you, men of earth, for all the love. But could you maybe stop telling her she's "the hottest b*@$! in this place"?



By: Daniel Riley, Photograph by Michael Thompson

Emily Ratajkowski will star in Gone Girl this summer.

I know how it looks, but cross my heart, there was no place else for me to sit.



My name card had an assigned table, and my assigned table had just one spot left, right next to a stranger I happened to recognize. Actually, that's underselling it. When I realized who it was, I U-turned and walked to an empty corner of the restaurant, where I mumbled gratitudes near a plant. This was during a moment, a space of a few weeks last November, when Emily Ratajkowski had gone mass. "Blurred Lines," the Robin Thicke song and video with which she'd announced herself to the planet, had sealed its slot as the tune of 2013; as a direct result, she'd been cast in David Fincher's Gone Girl. What Fincher saw in Emily (besides the obvious) was what everyone saw: a hammy sense of self-possession that upstaged the other models and musicians in the video, creating this iris effect that pretty much forced you to zero in on her. For the rest of the year, all 97 billion times that "Blurred Lines" played on KIIS-FM or in RadioShack or during a ballplayer's stroll to the plate, it was Emily who popped into mind. It's a weird thing, though, getting famous this way-"associated with a song," she would later tell me, "that I didn't write or sing. A song I'm going to deal with for the rest of my life, even though the video was a one-day job."



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At the dinner, Emily was wearing a black dress, and her mouth had the bright, clear-coat finish of a sports car. She talked with a couple of other models for the early part of the meal, and the first thing I heard her say was: "Oh, my God, you are such a Gemini!" Right. A beauty on the outside but an astrologer deep down. At a lull, I floated the name of a mutual friend. She seemed not miffed to have to talk to me about this friend. And so we got into other things. Mostly related to the California she grew up in, a few years later and two hours south of the California I grew up in. Her voice-"totally," "oh, fer sure," "chillest," "trip me out," "gnarly," "duh!"-was low and easy, coming at half-speed playback, sorta like a Laguna Beach character before she joined The Hills.



But then: "Have you seen Blue Jasmine yet? Most people I know hated it, but I loved it. I feel like, in Cate, he finally found the right vessel for his neuroses." And: "Let me tell you why The Corrections is a better book than Freedom." And: "I'm trying out a bunch of Bolaño. I always feel weird reading stuff that I know has been translated, but it seems to flow pretty well, pretty authentically."



Was it unfair to expect otherwise? Oh, probably. Psychologists call that False Assumptions About Women You've Seen Super-Naked Before You Talk to Them in Person. By the time I found myself lying about having read some recent New Yorker short story she liked, whatever surprise I experienced at the outset had faded.

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