Toro July 05
Kristin Kreuk Introduces
The Women of Summer
Article by Timothy Taylor
There are three things worth knowing about Kristin Kreuk. Her favorite career memory is galloping up the Fraser Valley on horseback in the sunshine with a heli-cam thundering just ahead of her. Last year on holiday, she was followed, room to room in the Louvre, by a giggling school-aged crowd of Parisian Smallville fans. The show's adult fans might be surprised to learn that its star's novel of the moment is Midnight's Children.
Her summer reading is Rushdie, people. Maybe that's all you need to know.
That and, well, she's beautiful, a young kind of beautiful to which television actually does only light justice. This has something to do with the eyebrows, which roll and arch in lively response to questions. It has something to do with the big laugh, bigger than you might expect, with the facial individuality of being half Chinese and half Dutch and somehow looking French. A face made more individual without the mediating lens.
Her career too, is highly individual. It poses questions such as, Where in the world did come from? And here's the short answer: Eric Hamber Secondary School in Vancouver. It's 1999 and producers are struggling to cast a new high-school television drama called Edgemont. They're through with the casting agents, through with the child stars. Now they're hitting up high-school drama coaches for tips about promising students - cue the softening of lights and the sudden drop of conversation - and in she walks.
She was a senior then. Five years later, having moved from Edgemont to the role of Lana on the hit series Smallville, Kristin Kreuk is prepared to acknowledge that things have changed in a way she couldn?t have predicted, ever. She never did get back to those university applications. At the beginning, she simply couldn?t have expected this to become her life. She didn?t know what a mark was, a second team, didn?t understand lightening, didn?t know how to act. Now she does. She shakes her head in disbelief, still. But that doesn?t make it any less true: She is an actor.
Of course, surprise success has a way of working on the person, too. Kreuk reflects, ?My first season of Smallville. I sat in my chair the entire year, said two words to everybody, and read books. I was very quiet, very shy.?
Then she thinks, eyebrows shaping down. She laughs. ?I?m not like that any more.?
Words that capture tightly a pervasive Smallville theme. After all, in this show about Clark Kent?s early years, we?re watching classic pop culture icons in imagined formative stages. This sense of knowing who to expect ? Superman, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor ? but not knowing how they came about as people is perhaps the secret to the show?s appeal. And so Lana ? Clark Kent?s high-school sweetie who has gone on to TV-reporting glamour in the comic-book version of adult Metropolis ? is finding herself in Smallville alongside everybody else.
Kreuk says, ?The show is about people becoming who they?re going to become.?
Just like in her own real life, perhaps?
Pause. Eyebrows. Now, very sweetly, eyes raised, ?Just like in? all of our lives?
In her own life, the immediate future is at least very clear: a busy summer, work and play. Kreuk's first starring role in a feature film starts shooting in Vancouver, then in India. It's "an epic Romeo-and-Juliet love story between a Sikh and a Muslim during the last days of the British Raj," writes director Vic Sarin about the movie Partition, also starring Neve Campbell and Jimi Mistry.
But first, play: Italy with her best friend. Maybe not to museums this time. But to the countryside, certainly. "To hike, to ride horses."
To continue becoming what she's becoming - which, because we've seen the movies and read the comic books, is a story we have the odd feeling