Kate Beckinsale graces the July/August cover of Women’s Health (on newsstands June 26) and opens up about kicking Jessica Biel’s butt in her upcoming action film, Total Recall (in theaters August 3), and transforming her body by trading her intense gym workouts for a yoga-based routine.
Kate is more beat-down than babe-alicious Jessica Biel in her upcoming film Total Recall: “It’s not like a naked, porno, mud-wrestling-in-a-bar sort of fight—it’s a real fight.”
She’s used to fighting men, but fighting a woman provided its own set of challenges: “I did find that fighting a woman was very different from when I’ve fought men. There was a lot of ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I? Ooh, I’m sorry about that! No, it was my fault!’”
Kate might be a well known action star now, but she couldn’t even run when she started filming 2003’s Underworld: “I could run if a bear were chasing me, but I ran like a girl with my arms like this [flails arms]. The day they asked me to try a few punches, it was dismal. All I could see what despair in the stunt coordinator’s face.”
Why she switched from gym workouts to yoga-based routines: “I’d gotten particularly sick of being photographed outside a gym doing a squat with a medicine ball.”
Her fame for fighting still feels fairly strange: “It’s slightly strange being predominantly known for something that’s not necessarily my sensibility, but I’ve never had a plan.”
Recalling her first experience at a gym with her trainer, who had once been Arnold Schwarzengger’s workout partner… “It was a full-on boys’ gym: ‘How much can you press? Go harder!’ That kind of thing. They use to have a garbage can between the machines so people could throw up into it and then continue working out. That just seems far too gruesome. I didn’t want to be in shape that much.”
Growing up, she avoided gym class whenever possible: “I wasn’t particularly athletic. No one ever thought, ‘I must have Kate on my team.’”
Why she never went to the gym when she was younger:“To me, you only went to the gym if you were really weird and obsessive. No one I knew in London at the time ever did it.”
The progression of her life and career makes her feel … “It all just unfolds and I think, Well, that’s who I am now.”
