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Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry is set to blow into town this month to shoot the climax for X-Men 2.
"I have just two days of shooting time left, but some of the other cast members have up to three weeks of work left," Berry told the Sun yesterday in Los Angeles, where she was promoting her Bond film Die Another Day.
Over a five-day period, Berry did more than 100 television and print interviews for the spy film, in which she plays Jinx, the female spy counterpart to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond.
"I'll likely sleep the whole flight to Calgary."
Berry and her fellow X-Men 2 cast members will be filming the climactic battle sequence for the sequel to the 2000 hit on a closed set in Kananaskis.
"Considering we're in the heart of the Rockies, we can't go skiing while we're in Kananaskis for fear we'll break a leg. It's in a contract that we can't. I'm hoping I can do some dog sledding. That's what I really want to do if I actually have some free time."
In the X-Men films, Berry plays the mutant Storm who has the power to alter and even create weather fronts.
Berry says the sequel was part of the original Twentieth-Century Fox contract she signed four years ago.
She arrived on the Vancouver set having won a best actress Oscar for her powerhouse performance on last year's Monster's Ball.
"Having won (the Oscar) did not impact in any way on my return to X-Men. The great thing about this sequel is that I got a chance to reconvene and sort of pick up where we left off. That was the really fun and rewarding part of the sequel."
She said actors rarely get such a chance because "normally when you seem to be finding your groove with a group of people and really starting to gel, it's time to stop and say goodbye. My reunion with all these people was wonderful."
Though she remained evasive about plot details and her character in X-Men 2, she did promise fans: "Storm gets to present a point of view about what her emotional life is like, which is something I didn't get to do in the first one."
The only change she can admit for certain is that Storm will have a new hairstyle.
"When we returned, it was a big discussion about her hair because everyone felt there was something that desperately needed to be changed from the first movie.
"(Director) Bryan Singer and (producer) Lauren Shuler Donner wanted to get it right this time around."
The first action movie was filmed in Toronto. Except for the climactic battle scenes, the sequel was filmed in Vancouver.
Berry explains she enjoyed shooting in Vancouver much more than she did in Toronto because she was "raised in Cleveland, so I went up to Toronto quite a bit.
"It was a big whoop for me being in Vancouver for several reasons. I like the smallness of Vancouver, the quaintness and charm of it, which is a lot different from Toronto."
Best of all for Berry was the proximity to her home in Los Angeles, which she shares with her husband, R&B musician Eric Benet.