One celebrity down, a zillion to go

Yesterday I had my first celebrity interview. Now, I suppose that Gregory Smith of Everwood fame could be considered a celebrity, only I never heard of him before I interviewed him (and that counts for a lot) and I have a feeling he is only well known in teeny bopper circles where girls will plaster his face from the pages of Teen Beat on their walls.

No, my first celebrity interview was with the charming Anna Paquin. This was particularly cool for me, since I've been a big fan of hers. In fact, the first Academy Awards I ever paid attention to was the one in which she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Piano, at the wee age of nine. I remember she just got up on the podium and didn't say a word for a whole minute.

Then, moving to New Zealand myself, I found out what a darling she is to the entire country. At the same time, she's a true Canadian, having been born in Winnipeg and still doing Telecom commercials for the province of Mantitoba.

Last but not least, she's been in a few of my FAVOURITE films including Almost Famous, and all the X-Mens (well, except the third one, which I will get into in a minute). So suffice to say, I'm a big fan.

She was 15 minutes late for our phone interview, for which she apologized profusely. I told her I didn't care, I was just grateful to be talking to her.
We spent over 25 minutes on the phone, discussing such topics as Shooting in Manitoba (she loved it), Whether she feels more Canuck, Kiwi or Yankee (she considers herself a New Yorker), Why she's not tabloid material (she doesn't make a point of going out to be seen), and what her greatest achievement has been (getting established in the NYC theatre scene). Of course, I asked her a ton of Indie-focused questions, of which I will write about in my up-coming article.

But the most interesting question I asked was one I felt most passionately about "Why didn't Rogue fly in X-men 3?"
She, of course, wasn't in charge of the script of story (which is too bad, I'm sure if she had been she wouldn't have written such crap and would have been in the movie for more than 3 scenes). But yes, she thought it would have been really cool if she had gotten to fly, had been in the film more, had gotten more action, etc. After bringing up that, hey there is always next time, she added: "Well, it was called The Last Stand for a reason."
Ahhh, but in Hollywood, never say never. And that pseudo ending at the end of the credits, makes me think otherwise...I mean, come on, that film, as crap as it is, made 122M its opening weekend.

Before I let Anna go, I mentioned the fact I sat on the row behind her while watching Jerry Seinfeld at the Orpheum Theatre a few years back. She didn't remember me, obviously, but remembered that the show was one of the funniest that she'd ever seen. That made me like her even more, considering Seinfeld spent a good bit of time skewering actors and their profession.
"Thankfully," she added, "the cast (of X-men) had a good sense of humour."
I was grateful Anna did, cuz you would need one to put up with my inane questions.