News on Lena

Lena's one of the nominees for the Teen Choice Awards:
>> Article

kinda already knew that but still great news
wasn't that this sunday?

Agh! Keira won... Becks, stop smiling!

Choice Movie Actress: Action Adventure

Jessica Alba (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer)
Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End)
Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man 3)
Lena Headey (300)
Megan Fox (Transformers)

Was Lena there for the Teen Choice Awards?

I doubt she attended

Old article, neven seen before:
>>TimesOnline

May 10, 2003

My cultural life: Lena Headey

Finding TV a turn off and theatre untempting, the actress Lena Headey seeks solace in spirituality Soul food

Films

I love the whole ritual of going to the movies: it’s like being a kid. The first film I saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I was so excited that I threw up my chocolate. I thought that The Magdalene Sisters was a work of genius. It is a film about women, which is very rare, and that really thrills me.

I went to New York and met Martin Scorsese to audition for Gangs of New York, but I was so completely in awe of him that I literally couldn’t speak. I didn’t get the role. When I saw the film I found it hysterical and thought: “I am not supposed to be thinking this.” I thought it a soulless film — everyone on their own journey, nobody collaborating.

There is a beautiful honesty about Pedro Almodóvar. He handles everything with such tender fingers and creates great characters that you remember whether they are on screen for two minutes or the entire film. In particular, I loved Live Flesh with Javier Bardem. Such a sensual movie.

Theatre

I have to be dragged by the hair to go to the theatre. Shocking, but it’s true. I’m not very good at watching people wearing corsets, talking about things that don’t seem relevant. I did see Adrenalin . . . heart at the Bush last year, a brilliant two-hander by Georgia Fitch. It is about a woman in her forties with three kids who suddenly discovers love and has an affair with a drug dealer. It was really raw and beautifully made, the music was great and it was about our time — about now — and so poetic.

Television

I binge on telly. I haven’t really seen it in about six months and I look at it now and it is such rubbish. Smack the Pony is fantastic, though. Those girls are very clever. And I like Sex and the City because I can identify with it and I like the fact that none of them, apart from Charlotte, is demure and they talk about things we talk about. I also loved Clocking Off. I think Paul Abbott’s writing is brilliant. You never question his dialogue. It has a natural rhythm to the language and his observation is great. I found The Lakes completely addictive. Whatever I was doing, I had to get home to watch it.

Books

The book that has been with me for a year, which I love but find quite frightening, is The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (Rider, £10.99). I read a few pages and then have to digest it for a week. I was doing a course on learning to teach yoga and someone told me about it. It’s all about karma, Buddhism, compassion and how to make it through to the next life: whether you are coming back or that’s it.

It’s a huge book but it gives you so much food for thought. I was in India recently for five weeks and it was the perfect place to read it.

Music

I deliberately took nothing to India because I thought if I was going to have time to myself music would be a distraction. I have just worked out how to use my iPod and so far have downloaded 150 tracks including songs by Stevie Wonder, Coldplay, the Strokes and Chet Baker — it’s like a life’s work.

The last concert I went to was Beck at Brixton Academy in London in 2001. He’s a bit mad, but a great artist and musician.

Pet hate

Diving into a bag of Revels in the dark of the cinema. It’s like playing Russian roulette. There are too many orange ones and I don’t like them.

Lena Headey was interviewed by Pauline McLeod. She stars in The Actors, which goes on general release on May 16 and in Ripley’s Game, which opens on May 30

thanks kris for the article...

Revelations were few. Lena Headey let slip a few words about the pilot for a putative TV series called the Sarah Connors Chronicles – Sarah Connors, you may recall, being the mother in The Terminator films. Did she buff up for it? “Not as much as Gerry (Gerard Butler, the Scot who plays the Spartan king), that would be terrifying. Though Linda Hamilton (who played the part in the films) was insanely ripped. No, hopefully it will be a long journey, so the character needs somewhere to go.”

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol...icle1529865.ece

June 15, 2006

My best friend's (hot) wedding

Lena Headey seduces the bride in her latest sizzler. James Christopher has breakfast with a vamp

Lena Headey is far too young to start lamenting the demise of the British film industry. She’s 29, and there isn’t a director in the country who would shout “next please” without a spasm of anxiety. Some have. Richard Curtis thought she was “too intense” for Love Actually, and put his chips on Keira Knightley. Others complained that Headey was too pretty to cast. Yet the actress curled up on the hotel sofa beside me in a pink shift, bare feet and jeans has more tattoos than a Somerset biker. Her grungy hair looks as if it’s been dyed to death. And her latest movie, Ol Parker’s Imagine Me & You, is a classic romcom with a frothy lesbian twist.
Intense? Dear Richard, I think the word you’re looking for is intelligent. Pretty? Of course she is. Lina Headey has none of the shiny,manicured celebrity of Catherine Zeta-Jones. She hasn’t banked a juicy Hollywood cheque. Yet she’s one of the most exciting and instinctive British actresses to emerge since Katrin Cartlidge. She can also do sex and siren parts, whether she’s trussed up in Russian corsets in Onegin or slumming it in a horror such as The Cave.

The tall and slender actress treats her screen Romeos much as she does her breakfast. She slides off the sofa, snakes across the carpet on her hands and knees, undresses a large bacon sandwich, and teases it mercilessly for 45 minutes. Her erotic performance as Angelika in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm had much the same effect on Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. They responded like stage-struck hams impaled on the end of a fork. It is Headey’s most high-profile role to date, but it gave her little satisfaction.

“When I read for The Brothers Grimm I thought, this script is wicked fun, she says in her Yorkshire accent. “But the film was such a bummer. It leaves you empty despite the visual fireworks.” Her suspicion is that the film fell foul of studio politics. “The industry is under increasing financial pressure to play it safe for the American market. The excitement of making raw movies like we did ten years ago has all but gone.”

That said, she is genuinely excited about Parker’s feature debut. Headey is not, she insists, a lesbian. But her bitter-sweet performance is deliciously understated and surprisingly affecting. She admits that Imagine Me & You would have benefited if it had milked more lesbian sex from the relationship between the flower-shop owner she plays and the young bride she falls for at a society wedding.

Her old friend Piper Perabo plays the new wife who is torn between a baffled husband (Matthew Goode) and Headey’s bohemian charms. Their first taboo tumble in the roses should have been like Oliver Reed grappling with Alan Bates, I unhelpfully suggest. “I agree,” says Headey. “It was never going to be a big-issue film about being gay, but I remember hoping, ‘are we really going to get it on?’ The film was an utter joy to make. But personally I think it should have been hotter.”

For someone who has never had a formal acting lesson in her life, Headey has a fearless appetite to live the roles she plays. The emotional realism she brings to characters is the strongest part of her armoury. “I left school at 17 to act in films like James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day,” she says. “One minute I was in an NYT play. The next I was on a film set. I didn’t train. For every film I’ve always relied on an ability to access real feelings. I don’t know any other way. That’s probably why some directors think I’m too intense.” So did she feel obliged to fall in love with Piper on the set of Imagine Me & You?

“Yes. I think,” muses Headey, a tad hesitant. “Kissing her was very weird. We didn’t even have the luxury of being drunk. It’s easy to scream and shout, but to actually show intimate love in front of a camera is very hard. And almost impossible when you don’t feel something for the other actor. But the chemistry was nice between Piper and me. We’re old mates. We spent months together in wetsuits in Bucharest making The Cave.”

Headey is as disconcertingly candid about her appeal as she is about her films. When I ask if she’s ever worried about being cast for her “look” rather than her acting, she cocks an eyebrow and says: “Who knows, my friend? Maybe someone sees some talent in me. I’m not saying I’m a ‘minger’. But I seriously doubt directors cast me on looks and credits alone.” Her best work, she believes, is inextricably linked with directors who’ve been able to exploit her emotional gifts.

“Working with Stellan Skarsgard on Aberdeen (2000), a picture that had a tiny release, is still one of my favourite experiences.”

Her next film, Zack Snyder’s 300, inspired by the 300 Spartans who died fighting the Persians at Thermopylae, is apparently not short on blood or guts. Headey plays the Spartan Queen Gorgo and she relished the sheer brutality of the action and the extreme demands of the part. “Zack was offered a small fortune to bring the certificate down, but he said absolutely not. We’re all pretty much naked, and the battle scenes are full-on. It’s a fascinating film.”

>>TimesOnline

I would love to see this...

"She slides off the sofa, snakes across the carpet on her hands and knees, undresses a large bacon sandwich, and teases it mercilessly for 45 minutes."

I think you're still sleeping, Becks!

well then..don't wake me up

OMG that paragraph. I don't care if she states over and over she's not a lesbian or that she's married now- she certainly has some lesbian tendencies.

and you know that she wanted piper. She plays it down for press!!!

I just think generally women have lesbian tendencies.

thanks for the articles!!