Vertical Limit leading ladies Robin Tunney and Izabella Scorupco: Taking the demands of their craft to the limit

That was Boy Abunda, in L.A. last November, providing a much-welcome comic relief from the suspense- (and cough-) filled movie, Vertical Limit, which we were watching at the Cary Grant Screening Room on the Sony Pictures studio lot. The thrills came from the film’s mountain climbing scenes while the coughs emanated from several members of the cast as they dramatized one of the symptoms of altitude sickness. The coughing onscreen must be persuasive. Some members of the screening audience were coughing too. Boy’s companion, Bong Quintana, noting that a viewer beside him was already slumped, quipped: "Na-pulmonary edema tuloy itong katabi ko."

We were about to slump too, not from coughing, but from holding our breath watching the rescue action scenes set in Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain but considered by climbers as the toughest ascent in the world. Remarkably, despite the presence of male actors like star Chris O’Donnell, Bill Paxton, Scott Glenn and Nicholas Lea in Vertical Limit, the most gung-ho action sequences belong to the women. These strong ice babe types are portrayed by Robin Tunney, named Best Actress-Cuppa Volve at the 1997 Venice Film Festival for her performance in the critics’ favorite, Niagara, Niagara, and Izabella Scorupco, a James Bond girl in GoldenEye and a star in Europe.

We talked to these two actresses at the Four Seasons Hotel the morning after the screening. First to be interviewed was Robin Tunney, who was wearing the tiniest blouse we ever saw, a flimsy item that bared her navel and soul. Robin plays the sister that Chris O’Donnell’s character has to save on K2 but it is she, not the macho mogul (Bill Paxton) trapped with her in an icy crevasse, who saves the day. The actress who starred in End of Days (opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger), Encino Man (with Brendan Fraser) and the smash The Craft tended to "emote" before the writers present. She used "actor-ly" body gestures and sometimes answered with conspiratorial whispers, occasionally looking behind her as if her replies were meant to be shared with the reporters only.

Although the southern Alps of New Zealand took the place of K2, filming Vertical Limit under director Martin Campbell (credits: The Mask of Zorro and GoldenEye) for a record eight months at 10,000 feet was a risky venture. Robin revealed that each morning the cast was given avalanche detectors to put inside their costumes. "This was not done to protect us. It was so they could find our bodies and ship them back home for the funerals," stated the twenty-something who is married to Bob Gosse, the director responsible for her win at the Venice filmfest.

"I had thoughts about death," continued the actress who will be seen next with Nick Nolte and Neve Campbell in Investigating Sex. "I wasn’t scared but I wondered, if I died, will it be in the newspapers? Would my friends from high school go to my memorial service? I never made a will. I should have made a will! I’m thinking about these things and I realized, why are these things crossing my mind? It definitely was eye opening; it changed me."

Playing the world’s greatest female climber was a bit of a stretch for Robin, whose closest experience to scaling heights was riding an elevator going up the Sears tower in her native Chicago. The 28-year-old actress with greenish-blue eyes admitted, "I lied to Martin in our first meeting when he asked me if I was afraid of heights. I said, I love heights! Mountains, me? Absolutely. I can’t wait! I’ve never gone up high. Never been skiing, never been camping, never been to the mountains. I grew up in the Midwest. I had no clue but I had absolutely no problem with it. I think it’s because I knew if I got hurt, the producers would get in a lot of trouble so they took a lot of precaution. So I felt really safe. It was a great way to learn something. One of my favorite things about acting in movies is that you learn about something you absolutely have no idea about. In this movie, I got to walk on an ice floe."

Asked how she lands these physically demanding roles (she won the 1997 MTV Movie Award for Best Fight with Fairuza Balk in The Craft), this 5’4" tall former commercial model lowered her voice to a whisper (resulting in a writer’s transcribing nightmare), looked behind her as if to check that nobody else was around and said, "I came up with a theory as to why. Let’s not kid ourselves. People in this business talk and they find that I don’t complain. I will never say no. If a director asks me to do something, I do it. There was a point during the four-week training when everybody was congratulating me. No other actress wanted to do this movie. I was the only one naive enough to do this. It sounded like it was a big deal. One time, I was going up the mountain and thought, would Drew (Barrymore) do this? Claire (Danes), would she do it? I was running through actresses in my head like, who else would have gotten it? I’m the only one they heard!

"It was uncomfortable," she went on. "There were no usual star trailers and you were up on the mountain. There were practically no lunch breaks. You just grabbed what you can eat because the weather changed so quickly. When you had to go to the bathroom, a porta potty in high altitude seemed very far away. I felt like I ran three miles after walking to the porta potty and trying to take off layers and layers of costume."

The definitely-we’re-not-in-LA filming conditions aroused the competitive streak in Robin. "At first I thought, there’s no way they’re going to let the actors do any stunts. I’ll have a stunt double! But I ended up crossing two cliffs while hanging upside down on a cable. Scott (Glenn) and I liked the climbing the most, because we are both really competitive people. Martin specifically had shots of me that you can’t mistake for somebody else because the shot starts so close and it doesn’t pull away."

Although Vertical Limit recalls the action-packed Cliffhanger hit of Sylvester Stallone, the former offers more in terms of emotionally involving scenes. Robin has one big dramatic scene in which she pleads with O’Donnell on the walkie-talkie to turn back and not attempt to rescue her anymore because it was too dangerous.

Filming this scene was just as dramatic, according to Robin: "On the first few takes, I found it really difficult to act without looking at somebody. I was just staring and talking to this walkie-talkie. So I said, Martin do you think we can get Chris so I can have somebody to look at? He said fine so Chris came in. The next takes went well but not quite good. Suddenly, on take five, helicopters started flying over us every single minute. It was skydiving week in New Zealand. So take 17 comes up and after I’ve been interrupted many times, Martin takes off and says, ‘I can’t work like this. We need to make them stop.’ I can’t believe this was happening. This was my big scene! I’m crying mountains. Then I heard that Martin is taking $10,000 out of his pocket and paying the skydiving people to stop flying that day. That’s a lot of money! That’s a lot of pressure to get the scene."

Robin continued: "On take 19, a very strange phenomenon happens. Moths start flying all over my face. And they just won’t stop. On take 25, they fumigate. And you know the great smell from fumigation? And I’m trying to feel, this is my moment! On take 26, I was really tired. As we were filming, a P.A. walks in the door on the soundstage and the bell goes off. On take 28, which was the entire straight take they used, I felt so bad for myself. I was like trapped in an acting crevasse that I should solve it. And it worked!"

Although Robin and Chris play siblings, there’s a competition between these two Chicago natives who started their showbiz careers about the same time, or at least as far as her mother is concerned. Robin explained: "I actually did know him a bit. He’s not gonna admit it. We both modeled. Chris was a really late bloomer. I think he grew like a foot in his senior high school. When he was 15 years old, he was still wearing size 12 so he worked all the time. All the younger models lost out to him. We had the same agent. And then he got Men Don’t Leave (a movie that starred Jessica Lange). He was soooo good in that film. He seemed impossibly famous. And so my mom would always call me and say, (imitating mother), ‘Chris O’Donnell is in the papers. He’s doing really well.’ And I was doing only after-school TV specials, whatever I can do, even tampon commercials! So when I got this movie, I told my mom, guess who I’m working with? Chris O’Donnell. Then she calls me and says, ‘I read in the paper about Chris doing this movie. They didn’t mention you.’ But last week, a Chicago Sunday paper had a big story on Chris and me. She’s happy. She said, ‘They printed just as much as what you said as he said.’"

For European stunner Izabella Scorupco, if there was competition in her budding Hollywood career, it would have been with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kim Basinger. Izabella was reportedly up for the role in L.A. Confidential that eventually went to Kim Basinger who went to win an Oscar. Vertical Limit director Campbell, who launched Izabella’s international career by casting her in GoldenEye, was said to have first offered the role in The Mask of Zorro to her, not Catherine. Would Izabella be the one holding a pre-nup agreement with Michael Douglas that is worth millions had she accepted the role in The Mask?

Izabella, in white turtleneck and tan leather pants, is the most beautiful actress we’ve interviewed since Charlize Theron. Her photos in a recent issue of the men’s magazine, Maxim, sizzled but in Vertical Limit, she’s all bundled up, delivers a mean right hook to one of the guys and, in the film’s most thrilling scene set in an icy slope, rescues another guy with nothing more than an ice pick. This green-eyed blonde who was born in Poland but grew up star-struck in Sweden ("My mother saw early that something was very wrong with her little girl," she joked) plays a tough French-Canadian medic who warms up to Chris’ character.

Asked if she has done some mountain climbing before this movie, the leading lady in the biggest film in Polish history (Ogniem I Mieczem) replied, "No, I haven’t. It was my first time. I’m not going to do it again. It’s just very dangerous. I stuck to Chris because he’s the biggest star and they couldn’t afford to kill him. It was the biggest challenge I’ve ever had in my whole life. Barry (Blanchard, a famous climber who was the climbing consultant of the film and Cliffhanger) is my idol but I don’t understand why he does it. I’ve asked him and he says, ‘Because I’m chilling out.’ How can you relax while climbing an icy peak? We were tense."

As the first Bond girl in nine years after the suave agent was resurrected with Pierce Brosnan, Izabella thought she would wear "fabulous clothes and tiny bikinis." Instead, she was given a dowdy Russian haircut and drab clothes. But it was her computer specialist character, not 007, who saves London from destruction. The one-time model who appeared in major European magazines relished playing another no-nonsense woman in Vertical Limit. She told us in her charming Swedish accent, "My character starts out being very introvert, doesn’t talk much because she hates what she is doing, working at base camp. She doesn’t want to talk to these guys because she feels that there’s nothing worth talking about with these guys. She becomes more involved with the people around her because of her relationship with Chris’ character."

Izabella turned down some star-making Hollywood roles in the ’90s because she was starting a family with a Polish ice-hockey player, from whom she is now separated. She has a child, 3, from that marriage. She also starred in hit films in Poland and Sweden, where, as is the practice in Manila, her early success as a teen actress qualified her to become a pop singer as well. Izabella bared at the conclusion of our interview that she has decided to move to LA. "I just want to take a chance," she explained. "I’d like to be in the right place when they’re auditioning." Ironically, Izabella’s next film takes her back to Europe, where she will be the leading lady of Matthew ("I like to play the drums in the nude") McConaughey and Christian Bale. With a bit of luck, Izabella just may get a chance to catch up, perhaps not with Kim Basinger, but at least with Catherine Zeta-Jones.