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HOLLYWOOD -- Movie sex and Deborah Unger seem to go hand in hand, so to speak.
Unger has lots to say about that. The Vancouver-born actress has lots to say about everything.
In fact, you usually don't have to ask her what she's thinking about, because she's already told you.
For instance, Unger co-stars in The Game, which features Michael Douglas and opens Sept. 12 in Toronto.
So I'm thinking she's got to be the object of Douglas' desire in the sexy bare-all tradition of her other high-profile performances in David Cronenberg's Crash and Christopher Crowe's Whispers In The Dark.
Unger -- who says of Cronenberg, "I say he's extremely intelligent because most people in the movie industry kind of aren't," -- has news for me. She's fully clothed and very focused in the David Fincher film, which deals with a wealthy banker (Douglas) who gets involved in an elaborate prank as part of a birthday gift.
Unger plays a waitress that Douglas' heartless money man meets along the way, which usually is the signal for sexual fireworks. But, in The Game, it never happens.
"I was very lucky that this movie came right after Crash," Unger says. "I don't think it's very common in a large budget film to have the main chick not be the sex pillow."
Unger actually portrays the manipulator with a wiseacre attitude in The Game, something Unger finds as natural as the sex scenes in the notorious Crash weren't.
"Crash was very specific," she says chuckling at her understatement. "But, y'know, the stigma hasn't stuck to me."
She will continue to distance herself from the sex-siren business with her next picture, The History Of Luminous Motion, where she plays a "whacked out mother on barbituates and alcohol."
The change is doing her good. After Crash, Unger was inundated with so called sexy parts that she regarded as sexless and exploitive.
"I turned down a lot of B-grade femme fatale crap that was thrown my way," admits Unger.
That's why she was so thrilled to win a big studio part in The Game without subjecting herself, and Douglas, to the sex cliche.
"It really would've reduced him to that vapid male who in the middle of a life-and-death situation gets a woody because, y'know, there's some chick in a dress."
Even if that chick, y'know, is 30-year-old Unger, who attended the Australian National Institute Of Dramatic Art in Sydney, worked in Aussie TV and movies before winning North American acclaim with Whispers In The Dark and Crash.
Her slow but steady career climb frustrates her fans, but not her. She divides her time between Vancouver and L.A., and stays far away from the high maintenance Hollywood attitude.
"I actually love auditioning," she says of the acting grind, "because I usually don't get the part.
"I've tested with Daniel Day-Lewis, De Niro, Pacino, Tom Cruise. So I've gotten to that point, and I understand when I don't get it. There are a lot of very talented people out there."
So when she read with Michael Douglas she "was shocked when I got the part," shocked when she got along with Douglas "who is no princess," and even more shocked when she missed an important cue on The Game set.
"Michael screeched off in the car that I was supposed to be in," she recalls, "but I ended up lying on the curb. The car got away but I didn't. Ten film days later, the doctor said, 'It's fractured.' I'm such a klutz."
But an honest klutz who obviously can portray hurt.