In its dwindling days of operation in summer 2003, shoppers carry on as usual at the Thornhill Mall, oblivious to the horrific goings-on in the closed-off south end of the building.

Here, behind the nondescript drywall is another, more upscale "mall," one that doesn't carry the whiff of retail failure. Amid a bunch of sparklingly new fake stores and neon and fluorescent lighting, Ving Rhames sits down to talk. One can't help notice he has a gaping wound on his massive right arm.

"Oh, that!" the 44-year-old actor says with a deep laugh. "That just happened today. A zombie did it."

Natch. This is, after all, the Universal remake of George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead -- the central plot twist of which is that a handful of uninfected humans (including Rhames, Sarah Polley and Mekhi Phifer) hole up in a mall, helping themselves to the fruits of consumerist society while the outside world turns into flesh-eating animated cadavers.

It's not Toronto's finest summer. A real-life scary pathogen, the SARS corona virus, dominates the news. It doesn't re-animate the dead, although the night before my interview, it did re-animate the Rolling Stones.

But Ving Rhames likes the place, and has even taken to throwing around words like "Scarborough" in conversation. Seems there's a little thing called the Iraq war that scares him more than SARS and zombies.

"I'm looking at property in Toronto," the Harlem-born actor says. (As of this writing he has yet to buy.) "We Americans are trying to police the world, where if you don't believe what I say, I'm going into your country and make you believe it. I decide who has nuclear weapons. Why? Because I'm America and I say so. We're right and everybody else is wrong.

"At this rate there's going to be a draft in America again. So my children -- I have a girl (Rainbow) and a boy (Freedom), 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 -- I want them to have dual citizenship so that when they're 18 they don't get thrown into all that against their will."

Got a problem with that? Tell it to his face, the one that sits atop six-feet-plus of solid muscle.

"I want to set up a company here, and make small independent films. Even the audience is saying 'We've had enough' (of big-budget spectacles)."

This seems like a ironic thing for Rhames to say, given that as you read this, he could be in either Belgium, Prague, Berlin or Ghana -- depending on where Mission: Impossible 3 is filming this week -- recreating once again the role of intelligence operative Luther Stickell opposite Tom Cruise.

"That's the part of my job that's fun and easy," he says of latching onto the Tom Cruise gravy train. "I may work six weeks out of seven months and get paid for it. We always shoot in some exotic location and my family gets a vacation."

He adds, "But I want to do more. Quite honestly, I do the big films because they pay a lot. But for me it's more important to do things that deal with man's inhumanity to man, or the human condition. Why do we spend, like $300 million on Terminator 3? I saw Bad Boys 2, and it was okay, but it's like every chase scene has to top the last one to the point of dead bodies falling out of the sky. It was like overkill, oversaturation. At some point we have to do things that speak to us as human beings again."

As opposed to zombies. In Dawn Of The Dead -- made for a mere $30 million -- Rhames is once again the muscle and moral force. "My character Kenneth is a police officer, and I'm trying to get to a place called Fort Pastor ... my brother's there, the only relative I have left. It's my overall intention in the piece, until I realize Fort Pastor has been taken over by zombies and I become a part of this group. Until about halfway through the movie, I don't want anything to do with them. I'm an ex-Marine and they need me much more than I need them.

"I've never done a horror movie, and they stressed to me they were trying to get real actors for this so you would care about the relationships. It happens that these characters are in a major catastrophe. It could be whatever, an atomic bomb. It just so happens to be zombies. And it's like 9/11 in the way it brought the city and the country together in a way. Catastrophes do that. You could have a redneck from the South and a black guy from Detroit, and you can become brothers in a life or death situation.

"So I liked that. And I like that I'm a hero and the only character in the film who gets to walk around with a pump shotgun," he says with another rumbling laugh.

The actors met with director Zack Snyder for rehearsals a week before filming started. "I don't think rehearsal was necessarily vital," Rhames says. "This isn't Shakespeare. Although it was good to meet the other actors and get a rapport with them. Sarah is like the little sister I never had. I tease her a lot. And Mekhi is like a son to me, him and I, we clicked. Sometimes you click with an actor and Mekhi and I had a lot of similar experiences growing up in Harlem."

He's equally upfront about the "research" involved. "Well, my character knows nothing about the subject matter (zombies), so it wouldn't make sense for me to either. I did do research on being a U.S. Marine, and my wife (Deborah) is a former LAPD homicide detective, so she was my research on that."

One thing that makes moving to Toronto theoretically feasible is the sheer demand for Rhames' services, regardless of geography. After Mission: Impossible 2, he's been signed to star in a remake of TV's Kojak (obviously no longer a Greek-American detective, Rhames says the character will still suck on lollipops "as a tribute to Telly Savalas").

He's also been lined up for yet another sequel, Baby Boy 2 -- a followup to the acclaimed urban drama in which Rhames played a father-figure to a wayward, immature ghetto man-child (Tyrese). "After 2 Fast 2 Furious, Tyrese has become hot, or whatever term you want to use," he says.

And then, of course, there's the theoretical sequel to Dawn Of The Dead (the original itself was part of the Romero trilogy that included Night Of The Living Dead and Day Of The Dead). Yes, as you know from the introduction to this story, Rhames' character was bitten by a zombie. And horror fans know that normally means a one-way ticket to zombieville for the bitten victim.

BUT HERE'S THE SPOILER, DON'T READ AHEAD IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW!

"If this film does well, you'll see me in the sequel," Rhames says. "And not as a zombie."


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