‘Sarah Connor‘ star embraces tough, tender sci-fi role
By Frazier Moore
Source: NewsOK

The only complaint Lena Headey can muster about her new series is about its title. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And she confides that she and her co-stars amuse themselves by adding a lisp when they say it: “The Tharah Connor Chroniclth.”

But by any name, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (8 p.m. Mondays on Fox) is an absorbing sci-fi romp that lets Headey kick some cyborg behind, be a devoted single parent and play a key role in defending humanity.

Based on the “Terminator” films, “T:TSCC” casts Headey as the strong, sexy mother of the world’s 15-year-old future savior. His destiny is to conquer Skynet, an artificial intelligence aiming to destroy the human race. But John (Thomas Dekker) first must reach manhood. In the meantime, fearsome Terminators have been deployed from the future to nip his mission in the bud.

Luckily, a Terminator cyborg named Cameron (Summer Glau) has been reprogrammed to help John and Sarah fend off their pursuers. Probably not by chance, Cameron’s a dead ringer for a cute teenage girl.

Befitting a sci-fi drama, the show has souped-up fisticuffs and fantasy plus the requisite high-tech mumbo jumbo.

“The thing I find hard on the show is the sci-fi dialogue,” Headey, 34, says. “And I’m (no good) at it! Thomas can do it brilliantly. He’s very dexterous with his words and has the capacity to remember terminology I can’t even pronounce.”

Not that she’s complaining: “I just bring it back down to a human level. The way I approach acting is instinctive. I’m playing a mother who has to protect her son. Like him, she’s in danger every day. You never want to die leaving your child unprepared for the world, and Sarah hasn’t fully prepared John yet. … And no matter how strong a woman is, that’s her vulnerable spot.”

As a mom under pressure in larger-than-life ways, Headey disappears into the character. She is almost unrecognizable from what, until now, was her standout role: as the bold, lustrous Queen Gorgo, wife of King Leonidas, in last year’s hit film “300.”

Headey (rhymes with “speedy”) leaves no doubt she’s her own woman. For a recent interview, she is clad not in Sarah’s formfitting jeans and tank top or the diaphanous robe in which she reigned as the Spartan queen. Instead, she looks a bit of a gamine in her denim overalls, a red-and-white-checked sleeveless blouse and what resemble, but aren’t, a pair of Ugg boots. She is animated and playful, her British accent in full display — yet she demonstrates outspokenness in a near-whisper.

Headey never really made the choice to be a professional actor. In childhood, she remembers “watching movies on television and thinking, ‘Doing that would be fantastic.’”

Then, in a school play at 17, she was spotted by a film producer and made her professional debut in the 1992 drama “Waterland” alongside Jeremy Irons, David Morrissey, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ethan Hawke. Roles have followed steadily.

Of course, certain acting projects made her rethink her career nondecision (the 2005 adventure-fantasy “The Brothers Grimm,” where she clashed with director Terry Gilliam, was a low point). “But every time I hate what I’m doing, every time the experience is ugly, then I’ll read something new and think, ‘I have to do this!’”