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Brave heart: Kate Beckinsale
Kate Beckinsale's icy thrillers heat up the big screen this spring
By Noreen Flanagan
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Kate Beckinsale has earned the right to a little Canadian-winter braggadocio after braving the Great White North to star in two icy thrillers. Weeks before the 34-year-old actress set off for Halifax to film Snow Angels, she was suffering from migraines. "I dreaded going there," recalls Beckinsale. "I was scared that there would be nothing for me to do with my daughter. I thought it was going to be bleak, freezing and miserable! In the end, we all cried when we left. I grew up in London and have lived in Paris, New York and Los Angeles, so I'm used to a fast pace. But when you go to a place where it's a little slower and less shallow, you breathe better. It was magical."
Beckinsale's take on small-town life is considerably more positive than its icy and isolating portrayal in Snow Angels. In the film-which is based on Stewart O'Nan's novel-Beckinsale plays a single mother who is having an affair with a married man while her mentally unstable ex (Sam Rockwell) lurks in the shadows. A tragedy involving their little girl triggers a shocking and deadly turn of events.
"It was the first time I didn't want my daughter coming to the set with me every day," explains Beckinsale. "It was just too intense. I didn't want her to see me in that state. My character experiences things that most parents resist even thinking about. I'm going to have a hard time watching the movie because so much of my heart went into it."
The thought of travelling to Halifax may have induced migraines, but heading to northern Manitoba to film Whiteout had Beckinsale "totally freaked out." In this movie, she plays a U.S. marshal stationed at a research base in Antarctica. After a two-year assignment, she is days away from catching the last plane out before winter sets in. Three days before takeoff, dead bodies start turning up on the ice. If she is going to escape the frozen prison, she has 72 hours to find the killer.
Hunkered down in her "small, slightly Norman Bates-type hotel room," Beckinsale says she spent the first night in total shock. "It was horrendously cold - I think it was minus 55 or something!" she recalls, laughing. "I was given a telephone-directory-size book on all the ways you can die from the cold. I thought, 'Fuck! Is this for real?'"
In true Canuck style, she and her family soon learned to brave the elements. One of her favourite memories is of her mother spending her 60th birthday "sledding down some death-trap hill."
Beckinsale also raves about Winnipeg's museums and children's theatre. "The thing I've noticed in my travels with a child is that the colder and more miserable a place is, the more interesting shit there is to do. L.A. is a dead loss."
Click here to read more about Kate Beckinsale!
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