Killer queen
Source: ic Wales

Playing opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger as an even tougher Terminator than he is could have been a daunting task but, as Kristanna Loken, the new star of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, tells Rob Driscoll, fame is altogether tougher than fighting the Austrian hard man

SHE'S about to become known as the world's most powerful, stop-at-nothing superbitch. Audiences from Tokyo to Texas will see her pick Arnold Schwarzenegger up like a tiresome child and throw him several feet into the air into the concrete wall of an already half-obliterated men's toilet.

So is it any wonder that 23-year old Kristanna Loken had just the tiniest of jitters before filming began on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines?

Make no mistake: Arnie may be back in the long-awaited newest instalment of his most successful franchise but it is one-time Norwegian model Loken who rules the roost in T3 as the ultimate 21st-century, ass-kicking Uberbabe, the villainous Terminatrix, aka T-X, a state-of-the-art female robot that is simply stronger, faster, smarter and more indestructible than any of its metallic predecessors.

"It's quite satisfying beating Arnold up," says 23-year-old Loken in suitably deadpan manner.

"At first there was a little trepidation in thinking I was supposed to be stronger than one of the strongest men in cinematic history.

"What a metaphor - what does this mean for my first big film?

"But then after you meet him he becomes just another actor. And I did a lot of training which went to the creation of the character and the overall physical belief that I could take on Arnold."

With her statuesque frame and archetypal icy-blonde hair it is easy to assume that Loken has recently hotfooted it from the Norwegian fjords, but she actually grew up in America, riding horses on the family's organic fruit farm in upstate New York. She has only been to Norway once.

She was in the saddle when the crucial phone call came from T3's director, Jonathan Mostow, another newcomer to the Terminator fold after its now iconic creator, James Cameron, said, "I won't be back."

Casting an actress to play the indomitable T-X was a global effort and, somewhat astonishingly, 10,000 actresses auditioned for the role in eight countries and every major American city.

As Mostow himself emphasises, "First and foremost she had to convince audiences that she could beat the Terminator in physical combat."

"Before we began looking I thought, 'How hard could it be to play a robot?'

"What I learned is playing a robot is possibly the most difficult role you can have as an actor, because you have to take all your innate emotional responses and completely suppress them.

"Even the way you walk is affected. A robot has no specific gait. A robot is a perfectly machined device that moves in a very smooth sort of way."

In addition to finding one woman to fulfil the emotional and physical demands of the role Mostow wanted a "fresh face", an actress with whom the audience did not have an established relationship.

Enter Kristanna Loken. Up until T3 she had been most famous for appearing in recurring US television shows like Philly and Mortal Kombat. But the role of T-X is clearly about to change her life and the character's distinctive look - clad in figure-squeezing red leather, spiked heels and her blonde hair yanked back into a severe Germanic bun - is about to grace the imagination (not to mention bedroom walls) of millions of impressionable teenage lads for many years to come.

She is as ready for the noise and fury of overnight stardom as she will ever be.

"You really have no idea what to expect but you just try to stay grounded and have all the key elements that are important in your life present," says Loken, looking utterly cool, relaxed and unfazed by all the attention as she sits on a sofa in her suite at London's Dorchester Hotel.

"The loss of anonymity I think is the greatest difference and transition that I've started to realise. I got a taste of it in Cannes for the first time, which was just wild. To see the posters everywhere and the craziness, I knew then it was starting to happen."

Loken relished the challenge of preparing to play a Terminator endowed with more than on-board weaponry and artificial intelligence.

"The great thing about T-X is that she can use her femininity and certain attributes to achieve her goals in ways that previous Terminators couldn't.

"It's also been a wonderful exercise to learn to play a character who expresses herself through a specific physicality."

Although clearly aided by a multitude of special effects and camera tricks, Loken was still required to undergo a punishing six-month training schedule to turn herself into a worthy opponent for the Terminator himself.

"I put on about 15 pounds of muscle mass," she reveals. "And I did Kravmaga, which is an Israeli form of martial arts that they teach the military.

"It's really a kind of brutal street fighting, incorporating surroundings, maybe picking up the lamp and smashing it over the head, and an elbow and a head butt and a knee butt. I had nutritionists to help me maintain the energy and the weight that I wanted to put on for the character. I did weapons training, weight training and I also worked with a mime coach to get that surreal physical human and non-human side of the character.

"I did end up feeling kind of invincible, but sometimes it wasn't always to my benefit either. In the whole period of the film I carried myself much more aggressively and was much more assertive than I normally would be. It took me a while to decompress after the film ended, to step back and say, 'I don't need to be this strong any more and have this kind of mentality'. I never really, really hurt myself, thankfully. You get bruises all the time, though. I'd always come home with new bruises."

In the $185m blockbuster T-X is the newest and arguably most memorable character, even though one can imagine there's not a lot of her featured on the script sheets. This brutal, emotionless killing machine is T3's answer to T2's morphing, liquid-metal T-1000, as played by Robert Patrick. Like the T-1000 it can change shape, but it is also capable of shooting energy bolts from its hands.

Sent back through time to complete the job left unfinished by her T2 predecessor, the T-1000, the T-X has been programmed to kill John Connor in order to facilitate the machines' diabolical agenda.

Loken's eye-popping fight scenes with Schwarzenegger meant long and arduous studio-bound days for both performers and the lady newcomer found the 55-year-old Austrian-born superstar nothing less than a gentleman throughout their on-set time together. She was pretty taken by his body, too.

"Arnold is amazing. I was really impressed by his physicality in the film. It's pretty phenomenal what he can do with his body, and even what I noticed in training was that your body becomes like a memory bank so that even if you don't work out for a while and you start again it goes right back to where it was. A lot of it has to do with the food too.

"I kind of made a correlation with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: I did everything Arnold did but backwards and in heels. That was true.

"Arnold didn't give me any advice but I think I just learned a lot by just watching him. Of course he's done the character twice before, and he's very knowledgeable in the fight sequences of what works and what doesn't work."

Loken was probably born to play an action heroine. At school she was invariably the tallest girl in the class and got teased about her natural athleticism. Today she simply oozes health, vitality and good living. And everything has clearly come together.

"I think there was a period in my life when I wasn't real comfortable in my body and my height, my stature," she says candidly. "I had nicknames like Amazon truck driver, and things like that, that weren't always the most appealing. But in this film being able to showcase that and finally being able to accept my physicality is something of a relief."

Men, she has noticed, are beginning to treat her differently. "It's interesting to watch how men react to me after they've seen this film," she smiles. "Some are fine and it doesn't matter; others are very timid. I actually met one actor in Cannes and I didn't know if I'd said something wrong but - and he was a little guy - he just kind of looked at me and said 'I just want you to know I have a girlfriend and I'm very much in love'. That came out of the blue. I don't know what that was supposed to be. It might be that men will be scared of me. Thankfully I have a partner already - maybe I should have told that guy that then, too. So far, out of those screenings they've had, there'll always be a group of people and they just stand there and look at me."

Apart from the body-crunching set-tos with Arnie, probably the scene for which Loken might best be remembered is one that many males gleefully anticipated when news first broke about the debut of a female Terminator: the "birthing scene" in which all Terminators arrive from the future totally naked. In Loken's case the T-X arrives in the window of an upmarket boutique in Beverly Hills.

"I was paranoid about that scene," admits Loken. "There were two driving points of the film, fighting Arnold and being naked in front of the world. Those were the two things that went through my mind. And it wasn't like most women who would want to be slim, and this and that. I wanted to be buff. So I think that's going to be a good image for women too.

"It was the actual Rodeo Drive we filmed on. They closed down the road and it was all night. They kept sightseers away, but somehow I managed to make it onto the morning news anyway. But I was in a robe at that point.

"But seriously, how can you pass up an opportunity to be nude on Rodeo Drive? It just doesn't get any more exhilarating than that. I had such a moment while we were shooting that scene. I was in that crouched position thinking, 'Wow, I'm a Terminator in a Terminator movie'."

Director Jonathan Mostow says it all, really, when he comments, with a wry smile, "I had more people trying to come and visit me on the set the night we shot the T-X arrival scene than any other."

He's only half-joking. Mmm - wonder why...

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opens on Friday, August 1.

TERMINATOR 3 star Kristanna Loken recognises the fact that the most advanced Terminator, T-X, is now a woman - or at least is played by one - is one that will be embraced by feminists the world all over.

"That's another thing that I've only started to recently think about," she says.

"And I don't think she's exclusively aggressive. Sure, at the end of the day she is a machine, not a real woman, but I do think there's definitely an underlying sensuality about the character.

"And while there's no overt sexuality - she doesn't have a programmed brain for that - she does use her femininity or whatever it takes to get what she wants, or achieve her goal, because it's all very goal-orientated.

"Nothing must get in the way of that. She's the ultimate feminist."

Playing the bitch, or at least the villainess forever up for violent action, is something totally alien to Loken who, despite her athletic body, was never a tomboy.

"I never got into fights as a child. I was a bit of an outcast, living in my own make-believe world that my Mom enabled me to live in very much, allowing me to believe in fairies and make-believe lands.

"Maybe I've just never let go of that and I'm still living in that fantasy world. But I've never really been in a fight until this movie."