Kiss and tell – Lena Headey on ‘Going Gay’
By Unknown
Source: Arena

In her 14-year career Lena Headey has played just about every part available to an actress. She’s been a soldier, policewoman, sexually precococious teenager, a cave diver, dominatrix, damsel in distress, pilled-up raver, prostitute and 18th century tomboy-trapper. With her next three parts she can add superhero, loved-up lesbian, and Spartan queen to the list.
Now, if she’d only dress up as a giant comedy banana or a ‘Weetabix skinhead’, she’d have literally ticked every one of Arena’s ‘sex fantasy’ boxes.

“It’s not a gay movie,” says Headey of her next role in Imagine Me & You, a light romantic comedy in which instead of girl meets boy, it’s girl meets girl with Headey falling for Piper Perabo.
“When it came out in the States everyone was asking if Brokeback Mountain had opened the door for this film, but they’re completely different types of movie,” says the toned 32-year old. Kitted out in indie rock-chick gear of battered Converse, jeans and green hoodie, she talks Arena through the etiquette of going ‘gay for pay’. “Piper and I are friends and we talked about the kissing scenes beforehand. She wanted to practice but I was like, ‘No, let’s just run up to each other and see what happens.’ So we just went for it.”
Headey spent much of the last year filming in front of a green screem as Queen Gorgo in 300. an adaptation of Frank (Sin City) Miller’s graphic novel about the 300 Greek soldiers who meet the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae. Next, she’s slipping into thight-fitting Lycra to take the lead in USTV network CBS’s big push for the autumn schedule, a Sex And The City-meets-Wonder Woman comedy called Ultra. Whie this combination might scream “kill me now” to most male viewers, Headey’s adamant it’s “hysterical”.

“I have these super powers and it’s all tongue-in-cheek but the drama in it is also quite dark,” she promises. “I chatted about what I wanted my ‘super suit’ to be and the general opinion was it was a bit too rude for American TV.”
Born in Bermuda, Headey and her family emigrated to the less sun-soaked suburbs of Huddersfield when she was five. She left school at 16 with “nothing in my pocket”, but was immediately cast in 1992′s offbeat drama Waterland.

“I just thought, ‘Fuck it, why not? If the acting doesn’t take off I can always be a baker.’” Pastry’s loss was acting’s gain and from there she moved deftly from big Disney projects – the live-action version of The Jungle Book – to the artsy Onegin; TV work like Band Of Gold and Soldier, Soldier to the more recent Steve Coogan vehicle, The Parole Officer and Terry Gilliam’s fantasy The Brothers Grimm. So no need to start injecting jam into doughnuts just yet.

“I feel my career has been like a bit of elastic, I’ve almost had the big break-through role so many times and then been back to where I started. I’ve given up thinking ‘This is it’ as it makes you dizzy, so I’m just going to do what I do and if things happen then they happen.”

Imagine Me & You is out June 16.