NEW YORK -- In real life she skydives and rafts whitewater. She debuted as The Next Karate Kid. So you'd think Hilary Swank would be in her element piloting a space shuttle and an earth-burrowing "terracraft" in the sci-fi flick The Core.

And you'd be wrong.

Swank says she'd love to do a real action film, "but I didn't do anything in this movie but sit there and pretend I was seeing things on a TV screen. It was all special effects to be added later," she says of The Core, about a desperate mission to restart the Earth's core after it stops spinning.

"It was more challenging than I thought, actually, because you're sitting there and they take a side of the ship off, and the camera squeezes in, and you see the cameraman and the focus puller. And then (director) Jon Amiel would come up and say 'Here you're reacting to crystals that are the size of the Empire State Building ... Aaaand action!' "

All of which is to say that the audience gets to live far more vicariously than the actors -- including Swank, Delroy Lindo, Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenwood and Stanley Tucci -- who were cooped up in a mockup of the Earth ship.

"The really hard part was having to say things like 'We're in attitude and ready for entry interface.' " On the plus side, she says with a laugh "being stuck with a bunch of guys in a cockpit for four months wasn't as smelly and stinky as you'd think."

Of course, the Earth-burrowing ship didn't get as much pre-release attention as the space shuttle -- a craft she co-pilots to a crash landing after interference from the Earth's disintegrating magnetic field immobilizes the ship's navigation. Trailers for the movie appeared in theatres on the very weekend of the Columbia disaster, and were immediately pulled.

Swank felt the disaster keenly. She researched her role with Space Station astronaut Susan Helms (not one of the Columbia crew). "I always wanted to be an astronaut, and her life was very much like my character's. She was in the Air Force and excelled, and she was plucked by NASA to be an astronaut.

"Columbia was a huge tragedy, and people ask how it related to the movie. But it didn't. I'm an astronaut and I'm in a space shuttle and we don't crash and no one dies."

On the day last week when we spoke, Swank was on a "dark" day between her Broadway-bound production of The Miracle Worker, which had just opened in Charlotte, N.C. and the Oscars (where the Best Actress winner for Boys Don't Cry was one of scores of former winners who appeared in honour of the event's 75th anniversary).

The Broadway move -- her theatrical debut -- is smoother since she and husband Chad Lowe moved to New York (they bought a Greenwich Village brownstone for $4 million U.S.). "We like the quality of life here," she says, "the blending of all different walks and talks. That was something that was really romantic, that we were really attracted to and it keeps us alive."

"I also wanted to do a play and that was part of the reason to come too. But Steven Markle who plays Captain Teller in the play lives in Los Angeles. So you can live in L.A. and come here just for theatre if that's what you want to do."

"This has been a very strange busy year, because I love the Oscars and everything that leads up to it," she says. "I love reading what people are going to wear. I love watching the Golden Globes, the same as any fan. And I didn't even know the Golden Globes happened this year. On the Monday one of my friends said 'So whaddidya think?' And I said 'Of what? ... The Golden Globes!' I had no idea."

"I see (my Oscar) now, and I still do a triple take. It's a wonderful thing to have under your belt, because you get respected on a whole new level, especially if you're a woman."


More Artists