PLEASE, FREEZE ME

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This article was published 04/09/2009 (6209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOS ANGELES — Kate Beckinsale puts her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart to demonstrate the thickness of a guide she received upon arriving to the wintry set of the movie Whiteout off Lake Manitoba, near Eriksdale, in March of 2007.

 

"When we arrived, they put a small telephone directory — this thick — under our hotel room doors the night before we were going to start shooting," the 36-year-old English actress says. The book contained lots of morbid warnings on "all the ways it’s possible to die here, of being too cold, or of being too hot if you keep your clothes on too long when you come inside, or if you take an alcoholic drink or breathe in a westerly direction… you’re all going to die, and we all panicked."

It turned out to be not quite as challenging as all that, although Beckinsale says her first impressions were grim.

"When we first came out, all the men had beards full of ice that I thought was a makeup-department test, but it wasn’t. It was real," she says. "And my hair froze to a point just from breathing on it.

"I thought, ‘I’m from England, I know how to handle the cold,’ but I’d never seen anything like it."

Such is life when you’re a beautiful actress who already happens to be schooled in the art of rough-and-tumble physical movies. It is doubtful Beckinsale would have been considered for the role of a tough U.S. marshall on a lonely detail in the Antarctic, as she is in Whiteout, if not for the precedent of her work as the latex-clad vampiress Seline in the movies Underworld (2003) and Underworld Evolution (2006).

 

For all the falling and fighting she does in Whiteout, well, it’s not as if she hadn’t done it before.

"I had a background of ballet and reading before I did Underworld, so the whole training thing was a complete shock to me," says Beckinsale.

"So it was much less like that (on Whiteout)," she says. "Once you’ve entered the realm of action movies, there’s nothing like the first time."

Indeed, the making of Underworld was almost certainly fraught with another layer of backstage tension, given that it was on that film when she separated from co-star Michael Sheen, the father of her 10-year-old daughter Lily, eventually to marry the film’s director, Len Wiseman.

For her part, Beckinsale has not signed to any further instalments of the Underworld franchise, though websites are abuzz with the rumour of another trilogy.

"I don’t think my daughter needs to see my bottom in rubber for another 10 years," she says.

As for seeing her mom do a shower scene, as she does in the first minutes of Whiteout, well, Beckinsale shrugs off producer Joel Silver’s admission that the scene might be a teensy bit gratuitous.

"Sometimes you have to do what you’re told," she says.

Whiteout opens in theatres Friday, Sept. 11.

He’s sold on cold

 

Beckinsale’s co-star Gabriel Macht (last seen in the title role of The Spirit) says that he’d take Manitoba’s chilly weather over sunny Montreal any day.

After the location shoot off Lake Manitoba, the production of Whiteout moved to Montreal soundstages, which were far more punishing, says Macht, 37.

"In Manitoba, we were in this extreme weather gear and I wasn’t that cold," Macht says. "The challenges I had were when we shot in the studio when it was near 80 F in the early spring in Montreal and it was probably the hottest set I’ve ever been on," Macht says.

"I was sweating bullets and I think I lost about 35 pounds."