At this year’s San Francisco film festival, Maria Bello was honored for exemplifying brilliance, independence and integrity in her work. You couldn’t argue with that, or with the festival catalogue’s description of her as “the definition of fearless.” Look at Bello’s performance as Viggo Mortensen’s complex, uninhibited wife in A History of Violence, in which she gets more than a little frisky over the thought that her husband might be a brutal assassin. Or her sassy waitress in The Cooler, where her scenes with William H Macy, as the schlub who represents her chance of happiness, were so explicit they made even non-smokers crave a post-coital cigarette once the lights came up. (“When you shake hands with her,” warned a friend before I left to interview Bello, “just remember where those hands have been.”)
Anyone who has applauded the 41-year-old’s uncompromising choices and tough-cookie persona will be puzzled by her latest role. But when you’re known for being radical, perhaps the only way to wrongfoot people is to jump into bed with a Hollywood studio rather than with William H Macy. Bello has done that by starring as the adventurer Evie O’Connell in the new Mummy sequel, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, in which she gets to wear some fetching hats, speak poppycock in a Virginia McKenna accent, and land a few punches on assorted reanimated ghouls.
“I’ve been telling my agent for years that I wanted an action movie, but no one saw me like that,” she says when we meet in Los Angeles, her hair returned to blonde from the dyed black that she sports in the film. “Two weeks before my 40th birthday, I guess I’d given up. I mean, how many action roles are there for women over 40? Soon after that, I got a call to say they were considering me for the part.”
The director, Rob Cohen, didn’t even have Bello on his wish-list at first. “I said to her, ‘You’re so well respected. Why would you wanna do this giant popcorn movie?’ She told me that after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, all her friends wanted to be Karen Allen, but she wanted to be Harrison Ford. I knew that was the way I wanted to go.”
Mummy devotees will recall that Rachel Weisz played the character in the first two films. “I knew from the start I couldn’t fill Rachel’s shoes,” Bello says. “She’s so pretty and such an ingenue. But I played Evie more like Katharine Hepburn at 40 — she has a grown-up kid, a 20-year marriage, she’s a bit more cynical. She dreams of being someone like Rachel Weisz.”
The official line is that Weisz was reluctant to bring her young child with her to China for the arduous shoot, but it is rumored that the 37-year-old balked at “ageing up” to play the mother of a 20-year-old man. If this is true, the filmmakers couldn’t have arrived at a more appropriate replacement than Bello, who has made it something of a mission to ensure that women who don’t fit the cultural ideal are represented in cinema. She still receives letters from women grateful that she revealed her body in all its far-from-aerobicized glory in The Cooler. “I’d given birth to my son the year before and I was about 20kg overweight. I had cellulite on my ass, which I still do, but I thought that was a good thing to show. All these Hollywood movies with perfectly toned female bodies make you think, ‘Am I not sexy? Am I not good enough?’”
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