Conan actress no damsel in distress

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This article was published 01/09/2011 (5332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Los ANGELES — In one panicky day during the shooting the movie Conan the Barbarian in the wilds of Bulgaria, novice horsewoman Rachel Nichols found herself helpless atop a horse that had decided to head towards the set, regardless of Nichols’ efforts to stop it.

The single-minded steed, Nichols says, was “a very large, very powerful animal that can tell when you’re scared of it. It was not interested in listening to anything you’d tell it to do.”

That may have been as apt a metaphor for Nichols making the film in the first place. The 31-year-old actress plays Tamara, a kind of female monk targeted for sacrifice by the film’s villain, warlord Khalar Zym (played by Avatar’s Stephen Lang), and subsequently rescued by Jason Momoa’s titular primitive. Once she was cast, she was swept along for a ride involving other things she had never done before: fighting with swords, bantering with barbarians… oh, and a sex scene.

Bear in mind that while Nichols may have the disarming beauty of a Hollywood glamour queen, she is smarter than the average starlet. She was an economics major at Columbia University when a sideline in modelling opened up an acting career that thus far has included GI Joe, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 and Star Trek.

So she was game when she was offered the part of Tamara, even if the film frequently threatened to put her in the role of a simpering rescuee, a prospect that Nichols viewed with some distaste.

“I didn’t want to be the damsel in distress,” she says. “We really wanted to update her and make her modern. The best way to do that was to kind of let her go toe to toe with Conan a bit more than somebody else he might have abducted…

“I had to give him attitude from the very beginning, but then I suffer the Stockholm Syndrome and fall for him,” she says. “But then we join forces and she gets to be more of his female counterpart.”

That role required Nichols to learn swordplay, where past roles, such as GI Joe, had made her comfortable with guns.

“I had to fight train to learn how to use the swords, but at the same time, Tamara shouldn’t be an expert. She shouldn’t be super cool and amazing and killing people left and right, because how did (a monk) become this killing machine?

“So I had to learn the technique and then we had to make it kind of messy and sloppy,” she says.

As for the sex scene, if Nichols found it unnerving, it wasn’t the fault of co-star Momoa.

“Jason and I had become really good friends and we were very comfortable with each other,” she says. “He is gorgeous and lovely and great, but it’s super-awkward when you’ve got (director Marcus Nispel) in the corner going: ‘Jason, grab her neck and bite her! Bite her!’ ‘Rachel scratch his back!’ I’m like: Oh, we’re going to break skin. There’s going to be blood!” she says with a laugh.

The scene’s nudity has annoyed some of Nichols’ fans on the blogosphere, she acknowledges.

“There are two men who are very mad because those aren’t my boobs,” she says. “They used a boob double. Apparently I cause some outrage as to why I didn’t feel like baring my chest in the film.

“But I have a father who, I think, wouldn’t have appreciated it so much,” she says. “And the boobs in the film are lovely. Jason handpicked them.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca