Loken in The Advocate
It's worth getting the magazine just for the cover picture. The tidbits about Loken's upcoming part on The L Word make it sound like we're in for much hotness, and hopefully Angela Robinson will come up with a cool project with Kris in the future. We can only hope.
A couple of months ago Kristanna Loken was known primarily as the stunning-looking robot who nearly terminated Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and as the lusty, revengeful vampire in BloodRayne. She was also on our radar for her role in the newly begun season of The L Word.
That was before she subtly let slip to me that she and BloodRayne costar Michelle Rodriguez were more than just friends. Now newspaper columnists and the blogosphere have transformed her into something else. Forget Portia and Ellen, Melissa and Tammy Lynn, Rosie and Kelly: Kristanna is suddenly half of the hottest celesbian couple in the land.
But we'll return to Lokuez (Kristelle? Michanna?) later. A revelation of that sort wasn't what I had in mind when I arrived at Loken's homey two-story house in Burbank , Calif. , on the morning after Halloween to talk about The L Word. The 27-year-old actress answered the door in a towel, fresh out of the shower. Having wet hair and wearing no makeup-nor almost anything else-only enhanced Loken's 5-foot-ll Nordic good looks. Combined with her unaffected personality, it was impossible not to like her immediately.
And that seems pretty much how out lesbian director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S., Herbie: Fully Loaded) feels about the actress, whom she directed in one of The L Word's upcoming episodes. "She's awesome," says Robinson, also an L Word producer and writer. "There's just no drama with her-she's really fun and incredibly talented. I'd only seen her in these big action roles, so I was interested in what it would be like to play a softer, more realistic character. I mean, she plays a PTA mom-no terminator or vampire."
As the new kid in The L Word's Hollywood lesboland, Loken gets to hook up with the show's classic stud woman, Shane McCutcheon (Katherine Moennig), who left her bride-to-be at the altar last season. This season Shane is playing mom to her brother's young son and meets Loken's character, Paige Sobel, at a PTA meeting (of all lesbian things). A single mother with a l0-year-old son herself, Paige feels an immediate attraction to Shane.
"I kind of hit on her at the meeting," says Loken, after she got dressed, "and there it starts. Paige has been really hurt by men, the father of the kid is not in the picture, and she's been busting her butt trying to make ends meet, holding down a couple of jobs. She meets this woman who is a little wounded as well, and I think she likes that sensitivity about her, that vulnerability.
"But she actually comes on pretty strong-which is probably a lot of Kristanna coming through. I have a tendency to do that says Loken, with a self-deprecating gruffness in her voice, funny how these characters kind of morph into, like, half of you are. My character is very confident. She's been with women before, but she's never been in a relationship with a woman. She this woman and [thinks], I'm just going to go for it and see 1 happens." Early last year Loken publicly revealed that she he has "gone for it" with women. That wasn't too shocking, considering that in 2003 she was seen in widely disseminated photographs snogging singer Pink at a Monte Carlo party.
"It was just something that happened, it was a moment ... maybe more than a moment, but at that point it was one moment," Loken says of their infamous makeout session. "I really liked her, and we had a lot of fun together."
In any case, talking about her sexuality-or acting on wherever it leads her--doesn't seem to make Loken uncomfortable: "I was so accustomed to being around people in same-sex relationships." Her sister Tanya, 16 years her senior, is a lesbian, and to Loken "it never seemed like a big deal."
"You're going to find someone, you fall in love, and you have a relationship. It doesn't really matter if it's one gender or the other. Believe me, there's a part of me that struggles with this confusion of not really ever being able to just pick one gender. I really haven't been able to do that yet-or if ever, I don't know."
Some of her most significant relationships, in fact, have been with women. "I think women innately are just more relationship oriented, and it kind of falls more naturally," she says. "However, I've also had some great relationships with men. One day I would definitely like to have a family, and whether that's with a man or a woman doesn't matter to me.
I've already got my friend who's going to be the [sperm] donor, so that's taken care of. Just give me a few years and we'll go from there."
It comes as no surprise then that Loken didn't need any special coaching (or coaxing) for her L Word sex scenes. Considering that she's quite the alpha female-Pink even complained in an interview that Loken wanted to "dominate" her-Loken presented a challenge for Moennig, whose character has always been the show's uber-alpha.
"I don't think on-screen Kate's ever had a lover who (a) has been in same-sex relationships [in real life] and (b) has been physically bigger than her," says Loken. "She's fairly tall but she's very skinny, while I'm almost a 6-foot, 150-pound woman. So there was a little bit of this back-and-forth thing before the first love scene-we can chuckle about it now-like, 'Who's gonna be on top?' 1 relented and was like [to her], 'You know what? Just try it. Just go for it.' You'll have to watch to see how that ended," says Loken with a huge grin, implying that it was no contest.
"I think she and Kate have amazing chemistry on-screen-it's neat to see Shane contest with Paige," says Robinson. And series creator Ilene Chaiken describes them simply as "hot together."
The character of Paige, however, wasn't created with Loken in mind- though Chaiken says the producers had suggested casting her in some role. "Then we thought, 'Wouldn't that be interesting [for her to play Paige]?' " says Chaiken. "It's not the obvious choice for Kristanna, but there was a lot about the character that resonated for her. Paige has a similar kind of fluidity about her sexuality. I admire the way Kristanna talks publicly about her sexuality-she is very open about the way she identifies, or the way she prefers not to identify, herself."
Loken's had nearly a lifetime to think about such identification, considering that her sister came out to the family when Kristanna was 3. "She was married to her first wife [Justine] then, and Tanya and Justine were both like my sisters," says Loken. "Then 1 got to an age when ... oh, 1 was watching some talk show with samesex relationships, and 1 kind of started putting it together. At first 1 had an adverse reaction, like 'Oh, my God, 1 can't believe it!' And then 1 thought, 'You get to hang out with your best friend all the time-that's so cool!' "
On The L Word she was able to draw on some of that childhood experience when Paige is forced to explain her relationship with Shane to her young son. "He's about the same age I was," she says. "I was definitely able to recall a lot of memories with my sister."
Loken's childhood sounds idyllic. She was raised in upstate New York in a sort of "follow your bliss" Norwegian-American family. Her mother, Rande, was a model; her father, Chris, a writer and actor. The couple also founded an organic fruit farm and petting zoo, LoveApple Farm. Kristanna was outdoorsy and athletic, riding horses, skiing, and taking dance and other lessons.
She was drawn to acting from a young age, and at 13, after watching a movie, Loken asked her parents, "How do I get to do that?" Her mother, without batting an eye, said, ''We'll take you down to the city and get you an agent."
Loken's first job was on the soap As the World Turns. She remembers auditioning with a 15-year-old boy who stuck his tongue down her throat when asked to kiss her. "Good thing I'm a farm girl and I kind of knew what was up," she says. (The boy turned out to be none other than Jason Biggs, who'd later star in American Pie.)
Loken also worked as a model, and at 16 went to Los Angeles "with a dollar and a dream"-as an emancipated minor. "Not because of a falling-out [with my parents]," she says, ''but so I could work adult hours." She promised herself she'd return to New York if she didn't get the part she was up for. "I didn't want to be just another blond, out-of-work actress," she says. "But I got the job, and I've been here 10 years."
After guest-starring on a number of TV series and getting small parts in a few movies, she landed her breakthrough role as the female cyborg T-X-reportedly over a number of more well-known actors. She's since been typecast as a kick-ass Viking beauty, playing characters with names like Brunnhild in the TV movie Ring of the Nibelungs, and Elora (a tree nymph) in the new medieval action pic In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
But it was another "kick-ass" action film, BloodRayne, written by famed lesbian writer-actress Guinevere Turner, that brought Loken to battle with the 28-yearold Michelle Rodriguez-an action heroine herself with films such as Girlfight, The Fast and the Furious, S.W.AT., and TV's Lost to her credit. Though BloodRayne was not a financial or critical success, her offscreen relationship with Rodriguez during the Romanian shoot became a topic of much conversation and speculation. In her January-February 2006 cover story in FHM magazine she confronted the rumors, saying that she and Michelle were "friends" who would "drink a lot of crappy vodka and hit the clubs." Loken also described one incident involving a swimming pool the two ended up in one drunken night. However, when asked whether the frivolity included any lip-locks, Loken pleaded the Fifth.
Which brings me back to what Loken described to me as the "$64,000 question." She had led me out to her scenic back patio that had a table on which sat a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray-full, though she had not smoked, nor so much as eyed them in our entire hour together. I wondered whose cigarettes they might be, and I asked her timidly about the rumors and just what exactly was or is going on between herself and Rodriguez?
Loken laughed and took a deep breath before responding, ''Ummm ... I don't even know how to answer that."
Of course, this was a door she herself had opened, as earlier she had told me that she was in a relationship, yet she wouldn't reveal the person's name or sex. "I can't say who it is because I know they would have a problem with that. So I think I'm just going to be very vague about this and let it be for the readers' discretion," she concluded with a cackling laugh.
But when pressed further about her Romanian connection with Rodriguez, Loken suddenly clammed up and looked down, perhaps to hide a blush. I told her that her silence spoke volumes, and she laughed heartily.
Then she offered, "Just don't look upstairs, OK? That's all I'm going to say."
With more laughter, and Loken's reiteration that she was on the record, we changed the subject. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Michelle Rodriguez has chosen not to comment on what her friend revealed. Loken herself has gone back to Canada to work in Vancouver on a comics-based series she's coexecutive-producing for the Sci-Fi Channel, Painkiller Jane, in which she plays a fast-healing-but-painfeeling DEA agent. She also recently debuted her darkly sexy indie film Lime Salted Love, which she executive-produced and starred in, at the Whistler Film Festival near Vancouver . Her representatives said she could not be reached for further comment about Rodriguez, and therefore about what has become one of the biggest reveals of 2006.
We can only wonder whether Loken's openness has caused any repercussions in her relationship with Rodriguez, or whether Rodriguez will choose to be forthcoming in the future, but it made me reflect on something else Loken told me when she at first held back about the sex of the person she was dating.
"Because people like to compartmentalize you," she said, running her fingers through her still-wet hair. "'Well, now she said this, so we can only see her in roles like this.' Or, 'Now she said that, so we're only going to put her here.' It's kind of a tough question to truly be honest about."
As far as we're concerned, the one thing that can be said of Loken is that she has been remarkably-if carefully honest, and that's the only compartment she should be put in .
A couple of months ago Kristanna Loken was known primarily as the stunning-looking robot who nearly terminated Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and as the lusty, revengeful vampire in BloodRayne. She was also on our radar for her role in the newly begun season of The L Word.
That was before she subtly let slip to me that she and BloodRayne costar Michelle Rodriguez were more than just friends. Now newspaper columnists and the blogosphere have transformed her into something else. Forget Portia and Ellen, Melissa and Tammy Lynn, Rosie and Kelly: Kristanna is suddenly half of the hottest celesbian couple in the land.
But we'll return to Lokuez (Kristelle? Michanna?) later. A revelation of that sort wasn't what I had in mind when I arrived at Loken's homey two-story house in Burbank , Calif. , on the morning after Halloween to talk about The L Word. The 27-year-old actress answered the door in a towel, fresh out of the shower. Having wet hair and wearing no makeup-nor almost anything else-only enhanced Loken's 5-foot-ll Nordic good looks. Combined with her unaffected personality, it was impossible not to like her immediately.
And that seems pretty much how out lesbian director Angela Robinson (D.E.B.S., Herbie: Fully Loaded) feels about the actress, whom she directed in one of The L Word's upcoming episodes. "She's awesome," says Robinson, also an L Word producer and writer. "There's just no drama with her-she's really fun and incredibly talented. I'd only seen her in these big action roles, so I was interested in what it would be like to play a softer, more realistic character. I mean, she plays a PTA mom-no terminator or vampire."
As the new kid in The L Word's Hollywood lesboland, Loken gets to hook up with the show's classic stud woman, Shane McCutcheon (Katherine Moennig), who left her bride-to-be at the altar last season. This season Shane is playing mom to her brother's young son and meets Loken's character, Paige Sobel, at a PTA meeting (of all lesbian things). A single mother with a l0-year-old son herself, Paige feels an immediate attraction to Shane.
"I kind of hit on her at the meeting," says Loken, after she got dressed, "and there it starts. Paige has been really hurt by men, the father of the kid is not in the picture, and she's been busting her butt trying to make ends meet, holding down a couple of jobs. She meets this woman who is a little wounded as well, and I think she likes that sensitivity about her, that vulnerability.
"But she actually comes on pretty strong-which is probably a lot of Kristanna coming through. I have a tendency to do that says Loken, with a self-deprecating gruffness in her voice, funny how these characters kind of morph into, like, half of you are. My character is very confident. She's been with women before, but she's never been in a relationship with a woman. She this woman and [thinks], I'm just going to go for it and see 1 happens." Early last year Loken publicly revealed that she he has "gone for it" with women. That wasn't too shocking, considering that in 2003 she was seen in widely disseminated photographs snogging singer Pink at a Monte Carlo party.
"It was just something that happened, it was a moment ... maybe more than a moment, but at that point it was one moment," Loken says of their infamous makeout session. "I really liked her, and we had a lot of fun together."
In any case, talking about her sexuality-or acting on wherever it leads her--doesn't seem to make Loken uncomfortable: "I was so accustomed to being around people in same-sex relationships." Her sister Tanya, 16 years her senior, is a lesbian, and to Loken "it never seemed like a big deal."
"You're going to find someone, you fall in love, and you have a relationship. It doesn't really matter if it's one gender or the other. Believe me, there's a part of me that struggles with this confusion of not really ever being able to just pick one gender. I really haven't been able to do that yet-or if ever, I don't know."
Some of her most significant relationships, in fact, have been with women. "I think women innately are just more relationship oriented, and it kind of falls more naturally," she says. "However, I've also had some great relationships with men. One day I would definitely like to have a family, and whether that's with a man or a woman doesn't matter to me.
I've already got my friend who's going to be the [sperm] donor, so that's taken care of. Just give me a few years and we'll go from there."
It comes as no surprise then that Loken didn't need any special coaching (or coaxing) for her L Word sex scenes. Considering that she's quite the alpha female-Pink even complained in an interview that Loken wanted to "dominate" her-Loken presented a challenge for Moennig, whose character has always been the show's uber-alpha.
"I don't think on-screen Kate's ever had a lover who (a) has been in same-sex relationships [in real life] and (b) has been physically bigger than her," says Loken. "She's fairly tall but she's very skinny, while I'm almost a 6-foot, 150-pound woman. So there was a little bit of this back-and-forth thing before the first love scene-we can chuckle about it now-like, 'Who's gonna be on top?' 1 relented and was like [to her], 'You know what? Just try it. Just go for it.' You'll have to watch to see how that ended," says Loken with a huge grin, implying that it was no contest.
"I think she and Kate have amazing chemistry on-screen-it's neat to see Shane contest with Paige," says Robinson. And series creator Ilene Chaiken describes them simply as "hot together."
The character of Paige, however, wasn't created with Loken in mind- though Chaiken says the producers had suggested casting her in some role. "Then we thought, 'Wouldn't that be interesting [for her to play Paige]?' " says Chaiken. "It's not the obvious choice for Kristanna, but there was a lot about the character that resonated for her. Paige has a similar kind of fluidity about her sexuality. I admire the way Kristanna talks publicly about her sexuality-she is very open about the way she identifies, or the way she prefers not to identify, herself."
Loken's had nearly a lifetime to think about such identification, considering that her sister came out to the family when Kristanna was 3. "She was married to her first wife [Justine] then, and Tanya and Justine were both like my sisters," says Loken. "Then 1 got to an age when ... oh, 1 was watching some talk show with samesex relationships, and 1 kind of started putting it together. At first 1 had an adverse reaction, like 'Oh, my God, 1 can't believe it!' And then 1 thought, 'You get to hang out with your best friend all the time-that's so cool!' "
On The L Word she was able to draw on some of that childhood experience when Paige is forced to explain her relationship with Shane to her young son. "He's about the same age I was," she says. "I was definitely able to recall a lot of memories with my sister."
Loken's childhood sounds idyllic. She was raised in upstate New York in a sort of "follow your bliss" Norwegian-American family. Her mother, Rande, was a model; her father, Chris, a writer and actor. The couple also founded an organic fruit farm and petting zoo, LoveApple Farm. Kristanna was outdoorsy and athletic, riding horses, skiing, and taking dance and other lessons.
She was drawn to acting from a young age, and at 13, after watching a movie, Loken asked her parents, "How do I get to do that?" Her mother, without batting an eye, said, ''We'll take you down to the city and get you an agent."
Loken's first job was on the soap As the World Turns. She remembers auditioning with a 15-year-old boy who stuck his tongue down her throat when asked to kiss her. "Good thing I'm a farm girl and I kind of knew what was up," she says. (The boy turned out to be none other than Jason Biggs, who'd later star in American Pie.)
Loken also worked as a model, and at 16 went to Los Angeles "with a dollar and a dream"-as an emancipated minor. "Not because of a falling-out [with my parents]," she says, ''but so I could work adult hours." She promised herself she'd return to New York if she didn't get the part she was up for. "I didn't want to be just another blond, out-of-work actress," she says. "But I got the job, and I've been here 10 years."
After guest-starring on a number of TV series and getting small parts in a few movies, she landed her breakthrough role as the female cyborg T-X-reportedly over a number of more well-known actors. She's since been typecast as a kick-ass Viking beauty, playing characters with names like Brunnhild in the TV movie Ring of the Nibelungs, and Elora (a tree nymph) in the new medieval action pic In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
But it was another "kick-ass" action film, BloodRayne, written by famed lesbian writer-actress Guinevere Turner, that brought Loken to battle with the 28-yearold Michelle Rodriguez-an action heroine herself with films such as Girlfight, The Fast and the Furious, S.W.AT., and TV's Lost to her credit. Though BloodRayne was not a financial or critical success, her offscreen relationship with Rodriguez during the Romanian shoot became a topic of much conversation and speculation. In her January-February 2006 cover story in FHM magazine she confronted the rumors, saying that she and Michelle were "friends" who would "drink a lot of crappy vodka and hit the clubs." Loken also described one incident involving a swimming pool the two ended up in one drunken night. However, when asked whether the frivolity included any lip-locks, Loken pleaded the Fifth.
Which brings me back to what Loken described to me as the "$64,000 question." She had led me out to her scenic back patio that had a table on which sat a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray-full, though she had not smoked, nor so much as eyed them in our entire hour together. I wondered whose cigarettes they might be, and I asked her timidly about the rumors and just what exactly was or is going on between herself and Rodriguez?
Loken laughed and took a deep breath before responding, ''Ummm ... I don't even know how to answer that."
Of course, this was a door she herself had opened, as earlier she had told me that she was in a relationship, yet she wouldn't reveal the person's name or sex. "I can't say who it is because I know they would have a problem with that. So I think I'm just going to be very vague about this and let it be for the readers' discretion," she concluded with a cackling laugh.
But when pressed further about her Romanian connection with Rodriguez, Loken suddenly clammed up and looked down, perhaps to hide a blush. I told her that her silence spoke volumes, and she laughed heartily.
Then she offered, "Just don't look upstairs, OK? That's all I'm going to say."
With more laughter, and Loken's reiteration that she was on the record, we changed the subject. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Michelle Rodriguez has chosen not to comment on what her friend revealed. Loken herself has gone back to Canada to work in Vancouver on a comics-based series she's coexecutive-producing for the Sci-Fi Channel, Painkiller Jane, in which she plays a fast-healing-but-painfeeling DEA agent. She also recently debuted her darkly sexy indie film Lime Salted Love, which she executive-produced and starred in, at the Whistler Film Festival near Vancouver . Her representatives said she could not be reached for further comment about Rodriguez, and therefore about what has become one of the biggest reveals of 2006.
We can only wonder whether Loken's openness has caused any repercussions in her relationship with Rodriguez, or whether Rodriguez will choose to be forthcoming in the future, but it made me reflect on something else Loken told me when she at first held back about the sex of the person she was dating.
"Because people like to compartmentalize you," she said, running her fingers through her still-wet hair. "'Well, now she said this, so we can only see her in roles like this.' Or, 'Now she said that, so we're only going to put her here.' It's kind of a tough question to truly be honest about."
As far as we're concerned, the one thing that can be said of Loken is that she has been remarkably-if carefully honest, and that's the only compartment she should be put in .