These actresses who lived to tell their tales of working with the Terminator in his newest movie, The 6th Day, are Sarah Wynter, who graced the cover of Vanity Fair as a member of "Hollywood Class 2000," the magazine’s much-awaited annual crop of actors and actresses to watch for; and Wendy Crewson, who jokingly refers to herself as "The Wife" because she has played spouse to several big name actors, including Harrison Ford and now, Arnold himself.
In separate interviews, Sarah and Wendy told us what it was like working with Arnie. In this action movie directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who previously helmed the James Bond smash Tomorrow Never Dies, Sarah plays a punkette out to assassinate Arnold’s character. It is five to 10 years in the future (the film shows a time when a helicopter can convert into a jet, among other high tech inventions), and Arnold’s Adam Gibson, a family man married to Wendy’s character, discovers he has been replaced by his clone. He must fight a billionaire engaged in the illegal cloning of humans and his thugs, including Sarah’s Talia, to get his life back. Sarah’s role gives new meaning to the kontrabidang walang kamatayan since she plays a villainess who is cloned again and again, with a new hair color (blue, green and so on) each time she is brought back to life.
The challenges faced by Sarah and Wendy in this Columbia Pictures’ blockbuster are as different as these actresses’ countries of origin. Sarah is the latest hot export from Australia while Wendy is a leading lady star in her native Canada who still has to break out of her "The Wife" mold in the US. "I trained like a maniac for three months before we started shooting," said Sarah of her preparation for her first starring role (and she gets to fight the Terminator, no less). "The film company got me a personal trainer. I boxed, lifted weights, did strength training, everything. To think that I’m not a huge workout person!"
On filming her fight scenes with Mr. Conan the Barbarian himself, Sarah remarks, "They were surreal. I had moment after moment shooting those scenes and I was thinking, What am I doing here? How did I get here? I’m beating up the Terminator! I had friends who would dream all their lives of doing this. Although I’m ashamed to say, It felt good to be fighting Arnold. It was like, Well, can we have another take? Because your adrenaline starts going."
Sarah continued, "I just didn’t imagine in a million that I would be considered for a role in which the producer and director would look at me and say, "Oh yeah, she’d would be good to beat up Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look at me, I’m nice, I’m friendly, not very sporty. I don’t think you can look at me and say, "Oh yeah, she’d be a good cyber babe. I really have to hand it to the director who had the imagination and the confidence in me as an actress. He didn’t just look at me and say, No, Sarah can’t do that because Sarah is Sarah.
Indeed, the woman in front of us with blonde wisps of hair framing her face, blue eyes and matching blue blouse is hard to reconcile with the punk terminator she plays in The 6th Day. Though Vanity Fair came close to describing the essence of Sarah in her cover story"the eyes of a seductress, smile of a school girl."
Asked if Arnie hit her hard, Sarah flashed those eyes and the smile and revealed, "No, in fact he was the one who would go" and she mimicked Mr. Muscleman in his low seductive voice" Bite harder." Nothing kinky in this movie, guys wait for Sarah to explain: "This was in a little bit of a scene that got cut out, when I’d bite his finger and he’d say, Bite harder. It’s like an Arnold sandwich." With that last sentence, it was hard not to be won over by Sarah.
Filming was not as easy as eating an Arnold sandwich, however. The 26-year-old Aussie admitted, "After the first week, I would come home and just cry. I never exerted so much physical energy. I was really transforming my body. I had to cut out all the things I like to eat. But there were no injuries. A lot of discomfort but no injuries."
So Sarah would welcome a chance to play a "bad girl" again and perhaps, bite another superstar actor’s finger. "It was fantastic to be able to play a bad girl," exclaimed the actress whose grandmother is the first female mayor in Australia. "Because my character is someone so unapologetically evil, she was so much fun. She certainly gets what she deserves. I would rather do good roles it doesn’t matter whether they are good or evil, as long as they’re honest and interesting to me and different. I don’t really want to do just good girls roles. I get bored.
"I enjoyed this character because she’s pretty powerful," she continued. "She’s really not someone I’d want for a friend. She’s really strong. She’s in there with the boys. Yes, she cares about her hair and nails but she’s never once the victim. Even when she wakes up naked from being cloned, she doesn’t go, Oh God, I’m naked! She doesn’t run. She never had to be rescued by any of the boys. And I do a lot of the action."
Asked what she was thinking of to get through her brief nude scene in a cloning lab, Sarah replied, "I was in the character. And the other thing is, she doesn’t care she’s naked. She’s empowering that way. Its not like, Oh my God, all my co-workers are seeing me in the nude. She doesn’t give a s–t. She just sits up. She’s pissed not because she’s naked. She’s pissed because she has been killed. She can’t wait to put on a different hair color. She wants to get her ears pierced, put her clothes on, get Arnold and do her job."
Sarah’s next project after The 6th Day may finally put her on the A-list of actresses. She makes a star turn opposite the original Miss Saigon Engineer, Jonathan Pryce, in a prestige production, Bride of the Wind. She declared, Playing Alma Mahler is my first leading role. That was like winning the lottery. I still can’t believe it. Especially coming from The 6th Day which is so futuristic with Arnold and I play this bitch in a blue wig to all of a sudden cut to 19th century as a Vienna composer’s wife. It’s amazing to play such opposite ends in the spectrum."
If fighting Arnie for her first starring role was Sarah’s hurdle, kissing the world’s action movie king on the first filming day of The 6th Day was Wendy’s "difficult" task. She deadpanned, "Oh my, it was so hard. Because I’m not like that. I’m so shy."
Then she laughed, "Are you kidding? I come on the first day and Arnold and I are in bed the entire day. The first two days we were shooting in bed." Filming kissing that long for scenes that appear briefly in the movie someone (Arnold?) has a lot of explaining to do. Wendy, who should be a comedienne, smiled, "Making out with a guy for 16 hours I haven’t made out like that since I was 16. I was feeling young again. I was feeling sort of girlish but my face is kind of raw by the end of day. Arnold’s beard growth, that heavy growth, is coming in. By the end of the day, I had a rash on my face. And the makeup people are trying to cover it up for Michael (Murphy, her actor husband) but they can’t. You have to wait till the next day. I had aloe mask on my face all night, trying to sort of heal my face."
The actress who played a Hillary Clinton-inspired First Lady to Harrison Ford in Air Force One told us more: "First day, I can see that Arnold is a little nervous about making out with this woman whom he doesn’t know." Putting on a low voice and imitating Arnold’s Austrian accent, Wendy revealed the actor’s icebreaker: "Put on this lederhosen and get in bed. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this. " She added, "Then he was fine. Once we started to joke around with that, we were fine. The ice was broken and then we were making out just like we had been making out for years."
Having appeared opposite Arnold, Harrison, and other big male stars such as Robin Williams and Tim Allen (amazingly, she is not yet a household name), Wendy was asked who is the best kisser of them all. She responded, "First of all, it’s really hard on a set when you’re making out with a guy. You think, Is he gonna be kissing you like he would if you were out on a date? " She joked, "Man, Arnold just slipped me the tongue! What’s up with that? You can’t judge it. You’re on a movie set and there are 60 guys standing around, holding the light and picking their noses. There’s nothing romantic about it. And you’re worried about your face, the makeup person is there doing your eyeliner. It truly is so un-erotic. Is the actor kissing me the same way he would in real life? It’s not fair. I would hope these actors are not thinking, Oh that’s how she kisses. Just based on that day. Because you really can’t get too explicit with them unless you’re filming an R-rated movie."
Since The 6th Day tackles the controversial subject of cloning, the inevitable question came: Would she consider being cloned? "Can you imagine? Why two of me?" she began. "I guess that’s why we have a cleaning lady and a baby-sitter. They take over those jobs. There is nothing about cloning that is good. Look around, go to McDonalds one day. Everybody in line, 750 pounds. Who do you want to clone? Look at all these overweight people. C’mon everybody, let’s make more. Think of the traffic. I wanna make babies in the good old-fashioned way. We hopefully evolve some more. Do you think we’ve reached our pinnacle at this point? No. I hope mankind evolves into something better. I don’t think were ready for cloning yet. Besides, you’re not gonna turn up with a guy like in the movie who is 45 years old. If your husband died and you want to clone him, your husband has to begin as a baby. You’ll be 80, he’ll be 30. He’s not gonna be interested in you, honey. He’s gonna be on to some babe."
Wendy, who also starred in the Harrison Ford-Michelle Pfeiffer thriller What Lies Beneath, appears next in a movie with the esteemed 73-year-old actor Sidney Poitier. "No," Wendy laughed. "I do not play his wife and I do not make out with him!"