X-Men 2 - Rebecca Romijn interview

REBECCA Romijn talks about reprising her role as Mystique in X-Men 2 and why misery loved company when donning her blue make-up with Alan Cumming. She also discusses some of the fun that the actors had on-set. She was speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. It was lovely to see you, kind of, as yourself in this film, was that sort of a bonus for you?
Rebecca Romijn: Absolutely, it was my very favourite two days in the whole movie. And we shot it at the very beginning too, so it was all downhill from then. But that was really nice.

Q. Did you have time to reduce the amount of time in the make-up chair this time around?
Rebecca Romijn: Actually, I learned so much about special effects make-up, having done the first one, and there was the same team that did my make-up on both films, so we call came back with lots of ideas on how to shave time off of the whole process, and we did manage to take two hours off it, bringing it down to six hours from the 8-9 that the first film took. Also, I know what I was getting into this time, but Alan [Cumming] had no idea, and I was soooo happy to be not the only blue person on the set.

Misery loves company, let me tell you, we were like a bitter old blue married couple in our trailer, sitting there, complaining about our blue faces, it was great.

Q. What was it like watching other people being you, being them?
Rebecca Romijn: You mean getting to take credit for other people's performances? You know, I was actually surprised that the actors I was morphing into didn't come to me and say 'I'm going to do this or that', you know. The only person that ever did that was Hugh, on the first one, during the fight, when it's really Wolverine fighting Wolverine (but Wolverine is Mystique), he came to me and said, 'hey, I hope it's ok, I blew myself a kiss, because I thought that's what Mystique might do'. But, you know, I would play the entire action, that the other actor did, so that they could choose when and where, in post-production, the morph was going to start. I usually had to match what the other actor did.

Q. I appreciate that you're all accomplished performers yourselves, but when you're on set with the likes of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Brian Cox, do you find yourselves asking for tips?
Rebecca Romijn: I have a funny story about that. I mean, yes, everyone has these very different backgrounds, but we still have such a great time together, and they are hilarious. I mean, those guys are as juvenile as we are. But, for example, Ian McKellen is very method, he's always got to know what his motivation is. So there's this one scene, where I'm in Stryker's lair, doing all this typing, and the X-Men all have to come in. They had just added this scene in the morning, and none of us knew what the context of the scene was to the story, and so Ian's got to run in and go, 'have you found it?'

And so, we'd been there for 15 hours, and he started going, 'I don't know what it is, what is it'? And everyone's like, 'oh please, Ian, don't ask, because that would be another half hour...' But he kept going, 'what is it?'

Q. Did you ever find out?
Rebecca Romijn: No, I still don't know what it is, and I had found it!

Q. Did you have fun on set?
Rebecca Romijn: It was only up until they yelled 'action' that we got it together...

James Marsden: In between Hugh Jackman doing showtunes and Becky's dog taking craps....

Rebecca Romijn: Alan and I had our little blue dance. We were all dancers.

James Marsden: It was actually remarkable that we got this movie made!

Q. The original graphic novel was hugely successful because it had an adult pitch? Did any of you go back and look at the source material?
Famke Janssen: No, but we did look at Latex Men.

Rebecca Romijn: My friend went to a comic book convention and brought back this pornographic version, which was very dirty. So we all had a look at that.

Q. Dare we ask what your powers were on Latex Men?
Rebecca Romijn: It was X-Men United, but in a different way! I don't know why they called it Latex Men, really, they should have called it Sex-Men. They were wide open [laughs]