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• The Rock
• Zooey Deschanel
• E.T. Premiere
• Ice Age Actors
• Samantha Mumba
• Frankie Muniz
• Amanda Bynes
• Britney Spears
• Mandy Moore
• Schuyler Fisk
• Shane West
• Sisqo
• Beauty&Beast Actors
• Jim Carrey
• Harry Potter Actors
• Cast of Ocean's 11
• The voices of Monsters Inc.
• Drew Barrymore
• Joey Fatone
• Lance Bass/Emanuelle Chriqui
• Max Keeble and Friends
• Jennifer Aniston
• Leelee Sobieski
• Reese Witherspoon
• Ming-Na
• Haley Joel Osment
• Sean Hayes(Mr. Tinkles)
• Kirsten Dunst
• Eddie Murphy
• Kerry Washington Julianne Moore
• The Ladies of Atlantis
• Cameron Diaz
• Shannyn Sossamon
• Heath Ledger
• Backstreet Boys
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Celine Dion
• Hanson
• Enrique Iglesias
• Sarah McLachla and Lilith Fair
• 'N'Sync
• Will Smith
  • Wild Wild West
  • Bagger Vance
• Spice Girls
• Britney Spears
• Justin Timberlake
• Oprah Winfrey
• Youngstown

Updated 4/16/02

We're Hangin' With....

KELLY HU

AGW: We were happy to see that the women in the film were really strong.

Kelly: That was one of the things that was most attractive to me about this role, the fact that the sorceress was so empowered and she really had control of everything. She really controlled the bad guy and she's the whole reason Rock goes back and battles with Memnon. When I first signed onto the movie my character didn't do any fighting action at all. It wasn't until after I got cast and they realized that I did martial arts and had experience in fighting, they said 'hey, we could get this girl to do this stuff for free. Let's put a sword in her hand' and I said okay! I got to take out a couple of bad guys and it was very fun.

AGW: Do you think you could hurt The Rock for real?

Kelly: (laughing) Yeah, with a big old sword and him not having one, maybe.

AGW: What was it like working with him?

Kelly: It was absolutely a great experience. I can't tell you enough about how wonderful he was to work with. He was such a gentleman. He was soft-spoken and really sweet, very smart, very aware of his environment and the people around him, very considerate. I had never seen him wrestling but someone brought a tape to the make-up trailer and I got to see him as "The Rock", the guy on WWF and I was amazed. I was thinking to myself, 'who is that guy with all these weird lines 'what's the Rock cooking'? What is that about? It was amazing to watch this guy on a microphone commanding an audience of 20 thousand people in an arena. He was kind enough, at the end of the shoot, to invite a bunch of us to go and watch him wrestle. It was my very first experience at these WWF things. We had such a great time. We were screaming and laughing so hard that I literally launched myself into an asthma attack. I'm a huge fan now.

AGW: Were you comfortable with those skimpy costumes?

Kelly: No. The costumes weren't the most comfortable costumes in the world. There was very little of them and I had to be sewn into one of the costumes every day that I had it on. It took me a little while to get used to it but I think the crew eventually got used to me in these tiny little costumes. My very first day of shooting was me, going down the waterslide (wearing very little) and I thought 'it can't get worse than this' (laughs). I guess they did that to me on purpose and it was good. They just got that out of the way so every little stitch of clothing I had after that, I was really thankful for.

AGW: When you were doing the beauty pageants was it always your goal to act?

Kelly: I actually got into the beauty pageants because I wanted to model and make some money in Japan. So I entered the Miss Hawaii Teen pageant with that in mind and luckily won the local title but when I went to the nationals, I remember my mom telling me, 'now don't expect to win the national title. America is not ready for an Asian Miss Teen USA'. I thought 'I'm Asian?'. It didn't occur to me that I would be different than anyone else. It was only my goal to make the top ten and I ended up winning the national pageant and the acting just came after that. I always wanted to be an actor but I never associated it with being in a pageant. It think those are two completely different things altogether.

AGW: Asian women have often been portrayed as objects but the last few years we have Lucy Liu, Lisa Ling, Ming Na etc. How do you feel representing the Asian community as a leading Hollywood actress?

Kelly: Wow. Now that you said it, I'm really nervous about it. Being 16 and winning Miss Teen USA, was a huge responsibility for me so I've come to hate the term 'role model' because it puts you up on a pedestal and makes you sort of inhuman and I think people choose role models for all the wrong reasons; because they can put a basketball through a hoop, jump high or run fast. There are so many more traits that are more admirable that you never hear about. I happen to be an Asian woman in this industry who is lucky enough to have the success I have to it doesn't mean I'm out there saving lives and coming up with cures for diseases. I'm just an actress, that's all.

AGW: What advice would you give to a girl who wants to be an actress?

Kelly: It's hard. It's not for everyone. There's so much rejection, so much more rejection than there is success in this business. You really can not think of yourself as only being an actress. You have to have other facets to your life because, if you really take all of this rejection to heart, it will just kill you. There is a wonderful quote from Kipling 'treat both failure and success as equal impostors'. I think it took me about ten years to figure that out, ten years for it to sink in and for me to understand what it really meant. All the success that I'm enjoying now with this film coming out, it's wonderful and means a lot to me but I can't take it so seriously because it's not all of who I am. The same with a failure. If I judge my life by what other people are judging, then this wouldn't be the business (for me).

AGW: Recently two African-Americans won major Oscars. Do you see a day when Asian-Americans will do the same?

Kelly: There is absolutely no reason why that should not happen. There are wonderful roles that are given to a lot of Asians as well, wonderful movies being made all the time. There was one man who won an Oscar for The Killing Fields (a few years ago). People of color are really having much more opportunity than they were before. This role (of the sorceress) that I got cast in, didn't call necessarily for an Asian girl to be a sorceress. There were girls of all ethnicities, all shapes and sizes and I was just the luckiest one that day.

AGW: If you look at the film's poster, it's color blind.

Kelly: The entire movie is that way. It's a very international cast. You'll even hear different accents throughout the movie and I think it's wonderful. It's very representative of a culture that I was raised in in Hawaii where you had so many people from all ethnicities living together.

AGW: What were the challenges of this role? Was the action a challenge?

Kelly: My role didn't have a whole lot of action to begin with. I had a couple of fight scenes; one with me in the bath was the most difficult for me to contend with because not only am I in a bath holding a sword fighting the Rock but I'm trying to cover myself up at the same time. That was the most difficult challenge of the entire movie but it was, overall, a really great experience. I'm used to doing action so, for me it was really easy. I had been trained in swords before.

AGW: How does this compare with the Friday the 13th movie you did way back when?

Kelly: Oh gosh, worlds apart. Here we're dealing with a hundred and ten degree weather and, in that, we were shooting in Vancouver and it was raining and freezing all the time. That was the very first movie I had ever done. I spent most of my time just shopping in Vancouver. I had the best time there. This movie is a huge leap for me. It's done wonders for my career.

AGW: What is your fitness regimen?

Kelly: Besides studying the martial arts, I've done a bit of Yoga but mostly I just watch what I eat. I don't have a diet per-se. I don't like to diet but I'm really careful about eating healthy. I have a restaurant where we had an all-natural concept of soups, salads and sandwiches and so I'm really into that whole healthy, all natural stuff and I think that really helps.

AGW: What is next for you?

Kelly: I'm currently shooting a film called Cradle to the Grave with Joel Silver and it's starring Jet Li and DMX and I'm doing tons of martial arts in this and some wire work.