Fighting monsters is hard work, as both Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale discovered when they took on a few of the stunts in Van Helsing. The two stars talked to Steve Pratt.

HAIR has played a key role in the career of Australian actor and singer Hugh Jackman. He first caught the attention of casting directors when playing the lead in the National Theatre's revival of the musical Oklahoma! in London - with hair that reflected his cowboy character's name, Curly.

Then he found international film fame as the very hairy Wolverine in the two X-Men screen adventures. Now, for the first time, he has his name above the title as Van Helsing, the vampire hunter pitted against three of Universal's most feared creatures - Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman. And the latter isn't the only one with a lot of hair.

As Gabriel Van Helsing, the Sydney-born performer has flowing locks, causing him to admit that "I specialise in high maintainance hair characters". As well as building up his muscles for the monsters' ball, he had to have hair extensions fitted. "Bloody painful," is how he describes the ten-hour process. He ended up with hair down to his waist, leading his wife, actress Deborra-Lee Furness, to start calling him Cheryl. If the hairdresser on the set in Prague went a bit mad with the comb and gave him extra big hair, the crew would rib him.

"They thought I looked like one of Charlie's Angels," he jokes. It wasn't just the hair that pushed him to the limit, the stunt work meant it was the hardest film Jackman's done in physical terms.

"I've always tried to do a lot of my stunts," he says. "I'm not a total idiot but I enjoy that side of things." Only afterwards did he realise just how dangerous some of the action was. One stunt, in part-icular, during a carriage chase through the woods caused him to stop and think. The idea was that he was flipped up and landed between two of the six horses pulling the carriage, grabbing on to their bridles.

"At one point, I realised one slip and I'm dead. And I'm between two horses, if they decided to go in opposite directions, that wouldn't be funny either," he says. "Afterwards the stunt guy came over to me and says, 'I can't believe you did that. I've never seen an actor do anything like that'. I'm sure it was safe, but if it wasn't, ignorance is bliss."

He didn't mind committing to Van Helsing which, like X-Men, shows all the signs of becoming a franchise movie. There were a few moments when he wondered about the wisdom of doing action adventure movies back-to-back before deciding that "a good movie is a good movie, and you can't complain about being in a film people want to see two or three of."

As for rumours that he's being lined up to take over from Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, the actor says they're just that - rumours. A Wolverine spin-off seems equally unlikely despite the talk, although he reckons they will make a third X-Men.

The main reason he's kept his good humour and sanity in the Hollywood rat race is his happy marriage. He and Furness have been married for eight years, and have a three-year-old son Oscar. They always travel with him on location, which meant time in wintry Prague during the filming of Van Helsing. "I'm really happy to have Debs and Oscar with me when I travel, which they always do," he says. "I don't know if little girls are the same, but little boys go stir crazy if you can't get them outside and let them run around, they go mental.

So that was a bit of a problem in Prague because it was so cold. But we loved the city, it's magical and quite beautiful and meant that working on Van Helsing was a ball."

KATE Beckinsale doesn't like vampire movies, which is surprising as she's starrred one after another of them. "Before I read the script for Van Helsing, I thought 'I can't possible do that' because I was in the middle of shooting a vampire film - and I don't really like vampire films anyway," she says.

"Another one seemed silly. But this is different and it's nothing like the vampire films I don't like." The 30-year-old British actress does declare a weakness for action movies, naming Die Hard as one of her favourites. The problem is that actresses have tended to get a bad deal, being required to do little apart from scream and flee from the monsters.

As she puts it: "If you're a girl, you always look for the scene where she might have beaten up three werewolves but then her knickers fall down and she cries. And there isn't that scene in this at all, which is a relief."

Less of a pleasure has been the reaction to the two movies that have brought her to the attention of American audiences. Second World War blockbuster Pearl Harbour - shown on BBC1 last Monday - was panned by the critics, although did well enough at the box office.

Last year's release of Underworld, a vampires and werewolves action movie in which she starred, went hand-in-hand with news of the break-up of her relationship with actor Michael Sheen, with whom she has a five-year-old daughter, Lily.

As the new man in her life is Underworld's director Len Wiseman, you can imagine the tabloid tittle-tattle that accompanied the film. Beckinsale says she and Sheen are still on amicable terms and that he's a great father. Reports say she and Wiseman plan to marry in July, and she's been quoted as saying she's never happier than she is now.

There's a sense that newspapers have always been a problem. Early in her career, she was always described as the daughter of Richard Beckinsale, the actor from TV's Porridge, who died when she was young.

"I've got more of a history in England," is how she puts it. In America, she starts with a clean sheet and now Van Helsing, in which she plays gipsy princess Anna Valerious who has a vendetta against bloodsucking Dracula, could well put her on the A-list.

The character is not, she says, "a girlie girl". She gets to fight with monsters using swords, guns and fists. As for doing her own stunts, all the tumbling and wire stuff was done by Beckinsale, but the really dangerous stunts were left to the experts.

Currently she divides her time between London and Los Angeles, while saying: "I don't feel like I've got much of a Hollywood life". She's not a great one for parties or premieres, says the actress who read French and Russian at Oxford.

She and Van Helsing co-star Hugh Jackman seem to have got along famously. "She's wickedly funny in her wry, English way," he says. "She's very beautiful and looks like a princess in many ways. But trust me, she's stronger than most girls I know. She's great fun to work with."

She's already made her next movie, playing real life actress Ava Gardner in Martin Scorsese's film about Howard Hughes, The Aviator. Next she's likely to be back in front of the cameras playing the action girl again - in a sequel to Underworld. She hasn't finished with vampires just yet.

* Van Helsing (12A) opens in cinemas today

Published: 06/05/2004