LOS ANGELES – When the pickaxe comes splintering through the door, Jamie King isn’t acting. That’s real terror on her face.
She had been warned the moment was coming during the making of My Bloody Valentine, but the Victoria’s Secret-model-turned-actress was still freaking out when the day came to shoot the scene.
You see, her character is on the run from this maniac who, invisible in the mask and helmet of a coal miner, spends most of the movie eviscerating his enemies with a pickaxe. But when this scene was filmed, King didn’t need to act scared. She really was in near hysterics.
“I was so freaked out,” she remembers. She can laugh about it now – in fact she thinks the blood-spattered remake of a 1981 Canadian cult horror film is an absolute hoot – but she didn’t laugh about it at the time. After all, the pickaxe splintered its ferocious way through the wood within inches of her face.
“No, no, you have no worries,” the filmmakers assured her the morning of the scene. “We’re professionals, we’ve got it under control, it’s never going to go wrong.”
But King has been acting long enough to be wary of such words of comfort.
“That’s what everyone says,” she observes with cheerful disdain.
“When you’re doing it, you just don’t really know what’s going to happen,” she says now. “I really had to muster up a lot of courage for that scene because it was the real deal going through – and it was this close.”
So no, she wasn’t acting.
She was prepared to give almost her all during the making of a movie that required the cast to endure weeks of dark, damp, unpleasant filmmaking underground in an abandoned mine. But that pickaxe made her very nervous. She also remembers the day she was advised her character would be undergoing another near-death experience when her masked enemy – who announces his presence with subterranean breathing reminiscent of Darth Vader – attempts to rip off her clothing. “We’re going to have the pickaxe run through your top,” she was told and she immediately started conjuring up nasty images of what this would entail.
“Sorry, guys, that’s not happening,” she responded. She not only feared injury but the possibility of being stripped naked.
“I thought that they were going to use that as an excuse to rip my blouse open . . . and I would be like that girl in Scary Movie with my boobs all over the place and spend the whole third act running around with no clothes on. I was really freaked out by the whole idea . . . and they were like: ‘No, it’s just going to be one button.”
The thing you quickly learn about King’s angst is that she has a sense of humour about it. In fact, her rapid-fire account of all the bad things that threatened her during the making of the movie has the trappings of a skilled standup comedy routine.
After all, she seems to be saying, how serious can you really be about a three-dimensional slasher movie – when nothing is too extreme to serve the needs of the genre, be it a victim’s heart that has been ripped out or an eyeball which has been gouged out?
On the other hand, she insists that she considers your average horror movie to be disgusting – and wouldn’t think of being in one.
She remembers that her husband, director Kyle Newman, and his writing partners went bananas when she was sent the screenplay of this Bloody Valentine remake.
“They flipped out because they were obsessed with the original one,” she laughs.
“Oh my god – you have to do this movie,” they told her. “It’s a cult classic. It’s amazing.”
King, whose previous movies include The Spirit and Sin City, says she receives lots of horror scripts.
“But I never found one that I thought was that interesting, because a lot of it was torture porn that I would never go see, so I would never want to be in the movie. I just find it kind of disgusting.”
But she found the screenplay for this film, with its story of a series of gruesome Valentine’s Day killings by a murderous coal miner who has seemingly returned from the dead, to be “really scary and really fun.”
She thought the story was more character-driven than most horror scripts and she also loved the idea of utilizing new 3-D technology – a technology which has triggered predictions from Steven Spielberg and James Cameron that this is the wave of the future, “the way that all films were going to be made.”
In the film, King plays a woman in emotional conflict – between her husband, the insanely jealous town sheriff played by Kerr Smith, and the ex-boyfriend (Jensen Ackles) who has returned after a long and mysterious absence. But now all three feel threatened by this unstoppable masked killer and his pickaxe.
My Bloody Valentine is the first 3-D film to be slapped with an R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America and to carry a warning about gore and nudity. But now that King has seen the finished film, she’s a big fan.
“Honestly, it’s away better than I ever could have imagined,” she says.
“I thought it was great that some of it was so absurd that you were laughing and then some of it was so scary that you couldn’t believe what you were seeing. And I loved that there was a love triangle in it and that it was suspenseful and there was the `whodunit’ thing. I thought it was really fun entertainment.”
In fact, she thinks a grisly movie like this one is a real spirit booster.
“I think there is so much turmoil going on the world right now that sometimes you don’t want to see a movie which is very depressing. It’s fun just to go to a movie where you can eat your popcorn and be scared and grab onto the person in front of you and where you never know what’s coming. It’s like going to Disneyland as opposed to going to the movies.”
King backs up her argument that gore can be fun by citing the film’s most talked about scene – the one in which fellow actor Betsy Rue spends some 10 minutes of screen time fending off her pickaxe-wielding nemesis. Rue appears to have earned her co-star’s undying admiration by doing the entire scene nude – apart from a pair of high-heeled shoes.
King hates doing nudity – and hated being saddled with this in Sin City.
“If you want me to take off any article of clothing, if you want to get me in a bathing suit, you’d better be shooting with a candle,” she grins.
“What I loved about Betsy is that she’s a great actress and she did not care. She was like – ‘I don’t need a robe.’ She’d be sitting in a chair with no clothes on. I love someone who can really embrace her body that much, and if somebody is going to have the confidence to run around buck naked with a gun, let them do it because they’re going to be fully committed – unlike me.
“Every great slasher film you’ve got to have some nudity, so why not really go for it. That was one of my favourite scenes in the movie. I thought it was hilarious.”
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