Total Recall actress lives double life on screen and off
LOS ANGELES — If you had been wondering where Kate Beckinsale went, you’re not alone. Beckinsale wondered, too.
She wasn’t on a sabbatical from movies, but following the 2009 thriller, Whiteout, she couldn’t find anything that enticed her enough to separate her from her daughter Lily, 13.
Now, Beckinsale’s back with a vengeance. Last winter, the 39-year-old returned to play a vindictive Selene in the fourth vampire flick, Underworld: Awakening. She mixed it up in the Mark Wahlberg crime drama Contraband. And, she’s one of the headliners in her director-husband Len Wiseman’s remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi action flick, Total Recall, which opens Aug. 3.
“You wait for a bus and then a few come along at once,” explains a smiling Beckinsale in a Beverly Hills hotel suite.
More seriously, she admits that the break was more of a mother thing.
“Actually, I was really trying to figure out how on earth you were supposed to be an actress and have a child the age that I have,” she continues. “I was always very used to taking her with me, and she was one of those kids who quite enjoyed being the new kid.”
Now, her daughter has a circle of friends and education to focus on, so it takes something like Total Recall to get her motivated.
In the movie (filmed in Toronto last summer), Colin Farrell plays the Arnie role of Quaid. He’s a futuristic factory worker in a postapocalyptic world. Things start to unravel when he begins to realize he has an implanted memory and might be either a spy for the freedom fighters or a superagent in the totalitarian regime.
Beckinsale portrays Quaid’s wife, Lori, who lives a double life as a lethal government handler assigned to contain hubby at any cost. (It’s an amalgamation of the roles played by Sharon Stone and Michael Ironside in the first film). Jessica Biel is Melina, a rebel who tries to help Quaid. Bryan Cranston is the government’s diabolical ruler.
Based on a Philip K. Dick story, Wiseman’s movie makes some adjustments. For one thing, Quaid doesn’t travel to Mars for his adventure but stays on earth. And, he doesn’t have as many glib one-liners as Arnie’s guy had in the original movie.
The director also stages a violent confrontation between Beckinsale’s Lori and Biel’s Melina that counts as a central moment in the plot. And there’s nothing ladylike about it even though they did most of the stunt fighting. “I would say 90 per cent of the fight was them,” confirms Wiseman.
The fists-of-fury experience turned out to be a key moment of reckoning for Beckinsale.
“I think that it was very much conceived as a vicious fight that could have easily been between two men,” says the actress. “It wasn’t one of those times where somebody’s clothing gets ripped and it all happens in quite a sexy way.”
She pauses to consider her thought. “And, I think we’ll really have achieved something when we get to not wear tight pants.”
The bedroom scene between Farrell’s Quaid and Beckinsale’s Lori was another matter when you consider the fact that Beckinsale’s husband hovered nearby on set, offering step-by-step instructions.