I’ve got transsexual hands. They’re the same size as Ben Affleck’s – which is spooky because he’s so much bigger than me,” quips Kate Beckinsale to the privileged assembled press as she shows off her newly acquired engagement ring.

It’s not the glimpsed rock that makes the gathering privileged – the English actress has pulled out of numerous interviews that had been lined up to promote Underworld. And no wonder. Her new fiancé is the film’s director Len Wiseman, and their on-set affair commenced after Beckinsale broke up with her partner of nine years, Welsh actor Michael Sheen – who also appears in Underworld, so you can see why the lass might be a tad reluctant to face the press.
Like a certain other English Rose named Kate, the end of Beckinsale’s marriage to the father of her four-year-old daughter has earned all manner of snide remarks in her native country. Recent articles have both tut-tutted and scavenged around for reasons to bitch about the 30-year-old. She’s come under fire for declining to appear on the cover of Maxim, and a recent Sunday Times interview actually began with the phrase – “The make-up walks into the room before she does”. Miaow.
While she’s reticent about the Michael/Len situation, she’s more than happy to discuss their new film. Underworld is a supernatural gothic thriller with perhaps the best pitch of the year – Kate plays a Vampire warrior and topranking member of the Death Dealers, a paramilitary elite charged with hunting the rival werewolves into extinction. She becomes involved with medical student and would-be werewolf fodder Scott Speedman, who turns out to be half-lycan himself. So, it’s Romeo and Juliet with vampires and werewolves. Wow. You can just picture the studio suits when they heard this was in the pipeline; the dollar signs lighting up their eyes as they began to contemplate tapping into the ever-lucrative teeny goth market; all those Buffy viewers, Evanescence fans and kiddies who think The Crow is the greatest movie of all time.
Kate’s aristocratic, yet ass-kicking latex clad vampire will surely knock their black fishnet socks off, but having fashioned a successful career as a romantic heroine (Pearl Harbour, Serendipity, Much Ado About Nothing) it wasn’t necessarily a direction she actively sought out.
“I got this script with a pile of scripts. It was on top, but it said vampires and werewolves and I thought ‘Oh God. I better pass’, but then I opened it up and the director had done these amazing drawings. And oddly, the girl even looked like me! It was not what I was expecting.”.
She certainly got into it though, and despite growing up a girlie girl with four brothers, she developed a particular talent for guns.
“They hardly had to do any training with guns for me, because it turns out I’m a natural genius with guns. I never would have guessed. I think the key is my man hands again. If you’ve got big hands, it’s easy to unload. If you’ve got small, delicate hands, it’s hard to reach.”
Underworld rather cleverly updates the classic mythology surrounding vampires and werewolves. Sure, the vampires are still cool and aloof while the lycans are furry and feral, but they’ve all gone high tech.
“We didn’t have a whole lot about garlic and crucifixes,” explains Kate. “The werewolves kill us with ultraviolet bullets. I can jump from great heights and land safely. I don’t turn into a bat or anything like that. I didn’t have to do anything creepy with blood which I was glad about. And we shoot the werewolves with silver, so it’s just like having a couple of big-ass glocks.”
Running around brandishing sizable weapons and silver bullets is unquestionably a departure for the dainty Beckinsale. She began her acting career by making an impressive screen debut in Kenneth Branagh’s sun-drenched Tuscany set adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), projecting star-quality and considerable ability as the virginal heroine. It wasn’t that surprising. As the daughter of TV actress Judy Loe and Porridge star Richard Beckinsale (who tragically died when she Kate was five years old), it was perhaps inevitable that she’d catch the acting bug, In
no time, she had chalked up a number of acclaimed performances, notably in Cold Comfort Farm and Whit Stillman’s delicious Last Days Of Disco.
But despite becoming an ‘overnight sensation’ in Hollywood following her role in the overblown historical epic Pearl Harbour, Underworld is relatively unglamourous fare. A small budget meant that much of the filming was done in none-too-glitzy Budapest – not a great spot for wearing latex apparently.
“The first scenes were shot on the subway,” says Kate, “and there was no air-conditioning. It was boiling, and the latex is the same stuff they make condoms out of, so it smells, and it got so hot. Then, when it’s cold, it gets really cold, and Budapest goes from hot to cold and back again very quickly. Yuk.”.
Still, kinky latex catsuits aren’t all bad. “It holds everything in, in a really good way,” grins Kate. “And pushes everything up in a really good way. If only everything looked like that in real life!”

Underworld is released on September 19